


West - Introduction

by shaenie



Series: West [1]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, F/M, LoTR RPS - Freeform, M/M, Multi, dark themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2010-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:17:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an incomplete story folks. It's possible It'll some day be done, but don't hold your breath. Only two of the authors involved are even still in the rowboat, and it'll take us a long time to get it up the river, assuming that we have the time and energy to do so. This is a Western using LoTR actors in a story that is more or less original fiction except for that fact. The story itself is about how a group of unlikely people end up tangled together without most of them even knowing it, and the unpleasant results of the tangle. That's all you get. If you're here, you were probably looking specifically anyway. *kiss*</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (These memories are secrets that we keep)

**Author's Note:**

> There are multiple authors in this work, but I can't find their AO3 profiles if they have them. They are, as far as I can remember, LJ users: lux_aeterna, mcee, blythely, azrhiaz, the_drifter, sparcck, abundantlyqueer, cheveauchee, and myself. If any of you ladies had pseuds, let me know and I'll list them under co-authors. If I've left anything out, it's because I'm scatterbrained, and mean no offense to you.

You don't even get a story with this part. You get a cast of characters. So there.

Billy Boyd - Poker player, some-time ranch hand, dangerous  
Orlando Bloom - Young jackass, apprentice poker player, dangerous  
Cate Blanchett - Madame, dangerous  
Karl Urban - U.S. Marshal, dirty, exceedingly dangerous  
Hugo Weaving - U.S. Marshal, semi-dirty, dangerous  
Sean Bean - Sheriff of Yuma, clean-ish, dangerous  
Dominic Monaghan - Piano player at Cate's, whore, semi-dangerous  
Harry Sinclair - Land baron in Yuma, a man scorned, exceedingly dangerous  
Ian McKellen - Poker magnate, wealthy, exceedingly dangerous  
Elijah Wood - Scoundrel, Sinclair's boytoy (sorta), dangerous  
Liv Tyler - Whore, madame in training, semi-dangerous

 

There are a few other names you'll recognize, but they're minor supporting characters, so I haven't listed them here.

You should know that this story was meant to be epic in scope. In many ways, it _is_ epic. There is a lot of prose here. It was written out of chronological order because we started at where things were supposed to start unraveling, and then realized we needed more back story if we were going to make the unraveling make sense for the reader. In a lot of ways, reading it out of order, as written, makes the story more interesting. It also makes it harder to understand, however. In the interest of simplicity -- or as simple as it can be, at any rate -- I'm posting it in chronological order. There are things missing, however. Important bits that are usually small, but affect the story in such a way that some events don't make sense without them. Take them on faith, if you can. We, as writers, have been working on this story for at least 5 years. A couple of us are working on it still, but it becomes complicated when you're working with such a large cast, and suddenly only have two writers, both of whom have their own projects going, to juggle all of them. Technically, I guess this is still a work in progress, but I don't want to get your hopes up. There's a real chance that this won't ever get finished, which is sad, because the finish we are planning/had planned is a spectacular one.

This is one of only two incomplete works that I mourn over.

That said, I think it's worth your time, even unfinished, or I wouldn't bother putting it here.

Or maybe I would, because I love it, and I want it here in case I ever want to read it again, in case I want to fill in the missing pieces and write the spectacular ending, even if I have to do it all by myself.

At any rate, I think that's enough ramble. If you still want to read it, I hope you enjoy it.


	2. Sheffield - Sean - 1854

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sean Bean - Backstory

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=katesheffield.jpg)

_Sheffield, Yorkshire. 1854._

There’s a bang and the rattle of loose-set glass as the back door of the tiny row house slams shut. The two figures entwined in the gloom under the narrow stairs freeze, but there’s no further sound or movement from the kitchen.

“It was jus’ the wind,” the boy murmurs soothingly, his hand resuming its slow but insistent progress up under folds of wash-faded blue wool skirts and white calico petticoats.

“Sean, don’t,” the girl says, but her tone lacks conviction.

Sean leans back a little, his face emerging from the shadows into the faint gray glow of reflected daylight, though his hand stills at its point of furthest migration. At almost eighteen years old he’s a broad-boned colt of a boy, his knuckles and wrists and shoulders too big under his slender muscles and pale skin. His features are still raw, the bones of his temples and nose and jaw emerging with sudden clarity from the softness of boyhood. His hair, golden blond until the summer before last, has darkened to the color and sheen of oak, much to his mother’s regret. And worse, his eyes, that were such a bonnie blue when he was younger, have curdled now to faded green, like the dirty bits of grass and weed that grow between the cobblestones in the narrow street outside the house.

“What? Don’t yeh want me to?” he chides. “It doesn’t hurt, like, does it?”

His hand makes a swift sure dart the last few inches of the way, soft curls under his fingertips and then the secret heat. Kate gasps, clutching at the rough-spun wool of his coat sleeve, but she doesn’t try to push him away.

“No, it doesn't hurt any more, an' yeh know I want yeh to,” she says, and he leans in to feel her breath flutter quick and hot on his parted lips. “But it’s wrong.”

“I reckon that’s one of the things makes it feel so good,” Sean smiles, pushing in on her so that her spine presses against the peeling painted wall behind her, and he feels all her sweet soft curves and clean true bones through the wool and calico and canvas of her clothes.

“Sean,” she says, and this time her hands are winding around the nape of his neck, inside the limp linen collar of his shirt and the bit of brave red cotton he wears as a neckerchief.

Sean’s big hands, still soft with schooling and raw with new blisters, slide decisively up the backs  
of her thighs, lifting her skirts until he’s cupping her bare behind.

“Sean, do yeh love me?” she asks breathlessly as he hitches her upwards against the wall.

“Yeh know I do, Kate,” he pants against her throat. “Yeh know I do.”

  
 _Scarborough Beach, Yorkshire. 1856._

A boundless sky and a limitless sea blur together in a soft blue haze, and a gentle warm wind smells of nothing but salt and sunshine.

“Sean. Come on, we’re missing the fair,” Kate says, plucking at his coat sleeve.

Sean blinks and tosses his head to throw his hair out of his eyes.

“Put yer cap back on,” Kate says as she links her arm in his and they turn away from the water and walk towards the stalls pitched on the thin scuffed grass higher up the strand. “You look like a gypsy.”

Sean makes a show of rolling his tweed cap into a twist and shoving it deep into his coat pocket.

“She’s away with the raggle taggle gypsy oh,” he sings softly, slipping his arm from under her hand and around her waist instead and dipping his face to where her honey-brown hair curls out onto her pale neck from under the coarse straw of her bonnet.

“Don’t,” she says sharply, pulling away so decisively that he stumbles a little, his heavy-soled boots untrustworthy on any surface except the city’s cobblestones. “We’re in public. Someone will see.”

“An’ when we’re in private, someone will hear,” he says with more acidity than he intends.

Kate shots him a look of cold fury before wrapping her shawl tight around her shoulders and setting off at a determined pace to the nearest stall.

“Kate, love, I’m sorry,” Sean says, but she’s already out of earshot.

Sean kicks his boot-heel into the soft earth underfoot, but the easy yielding does nothing to soothe his temper. He shoves his hands into his trousers pockets, knowing it makes him look like a ruffian, and saunters off in a deliberately different direction.

He loves her, but honest to God she just annoys him sometimes. In the almost two years they’ve been married, it seems too much of their laughing and kissing has given way to scowling and sniping. Sean’s parents had hoped the newly-weds would set up house with them, since Sean’s scant wages as an apprentice tool-maker at the iron foundry made a home of their own quite out of the question. But Kate’s mother is a widow, which means one less parent to hear them wearing out the squeaking springs of the narrow brass bed Sean’s father bought them as a wedding gift. Kate and her mother are washerwomen; coarse laundry is rough labor and has none of the preciously thin sliver of respectability that skilled trades have given Sean’s family. Washing brings poorer wages too, and Sean is heartily sick of make-shift meals of bread and tea for days before payday, and the leaking hole in the corner of the bedroom ceiling that he can’t afford to do more than stuff with rags. If it wasn’t for Sean’s wages the place would go to ruin entirely.

As it is, Sean thanks God every month when Kate curses at the bright red stain on her chemise and rolls out of bed, all bare legs and bitter disappointment. A bairn would be the straw that breaks this camel’s back, Sean sees, yet every month Kate’s lips set a little thinner and she lies a little more rigidly in his arms when he rolls over to her after blowing out the lamp.

It isn’t that his life is so bad, Sean feels, as that it bears no prospect at all of getting any better and a sure certainty of getting quite a bit worse. They’ve been lucky so far about Kate, but he knows that could change any day now, and the bloody women are too stupid too dread it. As it is, his own mother is getting pinched about the mouth too, and keeps asking if he thinks Kate is ‘quite right in herself’.

Sean’s already heartily sick of his job at the mill, coming home with his hands torn up with metal filings or burnt raw by solder drips, his nose and throat filled with greasy black soot, his muscles aching from the effort of pushing and shoving the big wagons of metal parts on their recalcitrant wheels to and from the machine shop. Out in the foundry proper, he steals sidelong glances at his da through the heat and sparks and din, at the thin-cord muscles straining under skin long-since heat-tanned to the color and texture of old hide. Sean’s da is thirty-nine, and he’s the oldest man on the nail-makers’ line. He won’t last much longer at it, but with a lower paying job and Sean’s mother always a bit ill, they could be in trouble all too soon and Sean’ll be in no position to help them. Sean’s da’ll drop before he’ll give up his job voluntarily.

“How about you now?” Someone barks almost in Sean’s face, bringing him back to reality with a start. “You look like a likely lad, you’ll have a go won’t you?”

Sean looks round enough to understand that he’s ended up in the front ranks of a small crowd gathered in front of rope-ringed bit of canvas currently occupied by a gent with enormous handlebar moustaches and a loudly striped shirt, and a hairy muscular fella in his undershirt and bright red tights.

“You like to fight laddie?” The gent with the handlebars demands of Sean.

Sean scowls, because the bloody knuckles he gets in the alleyway behind the gin-shop on a Saturday night get him enough grief from Kate without some bloody stranger starting in on him. It’s not like he even picks half the scraps he gets into; there are plenty of other restless young men with a strange rootless anger burning under their hearts to say a goading word or two in insult even if he doesn’t. It means nothing, just young dogs snapping at each other in frustration with the leashes they haven’t yet grown accustomed to.

“A silver shilling if you can stay on your feet for one full minute,” the barker goes on. “One full min - ”

“A shilling?” Sean snaps.

“Aye, a bright shiny - ”

“To fight him?”

“Aye. So will yeh - ”

Sean’s already shouldering his coat off and ducking under the rope. A ragged round of applause goes up from the onlookers, and several of the women crane a little closer to see him hang his coat on the post at one corner of the ring.

“Mind yer shirt, yeh’ll get his blood on it,” one brazen little lass calls out, winning some guffaws and giggles from her neighbors. But Sean hesitates at that, for it’s true enough this is the only decent shirt he’s got left to his name, thanks to his wife and mother-in-law’s less than delicate touch with his washing. He sets his jaw, shrugs his braces off his shoulders and starts opening his shirt buttons. The wee lass that called the warning to him shrieks with gleeful horror and hides her face in her friend’s sleeve. Sean pulls his red neckerchief off and stuffs it in his trousers pocket, then strips his shirt off and throws it on top his coat.

Near two and a half years, most of it spent at hard labor in the mill, have carved muscles as smooth and hard as cables under Sean’s white skin. His bones are still big and broad, but his flesh clothes them now adequately if not lavishly. The last trace of childish softness is gone from his face, but his features still have rawness to them, like freshly shattered stone before time and weather have had a chance to soften its edges. He walks a half-circuit of the ring, considering his opponent, while the barker hastily ducks out and arms himself with a brightly polished brass bell.

The other fighter takes up a theatrically correct stance, fists raised, toes turned out. Sean, just to be polite, settles facing him with both fists lifted to the level of his breastbone, weight drawn back on his right foot.

The bell rings deafeningly, and the other fighter swings a punch at Sean that whistles in the air like a drop-hammer scything down on its chain to the anvil below. Sean jerks back, and feels the air split and swirl against his cheekbone. He jabs out a short blow that lands glancingly on the other man’s chest, but his opponent huffs it off and comes at him again. Sean steps back, once, twice, but he’s unsure of how close the ring ropes are and he knows he can’t afford to be cornered.

His opponent lunges, and Sean tries to duck but he’s too slow and only succeeds in turning his side toward the other man before he’s caught in a bear-grip around the waist and lifted bodily off his feet. The other man’s arms, thick as hams, tighten until Sean’s breath whines out from between his clenched teeth. Sean panics, feeling his lungs working frantically on nothing. In desperation he lifts his arm and drives his elbow down blindly, and something solid and shattering takes the blow and he feels the liquid burst of heat on his bare forearm and he’s abruptly dropped. He staggers, gasping for breath even as he turns, trying to steady himself for the next attack.

The fighter’s nose is a swelling mess and the lower half his face is a red mask with red streaked teeth bared between bloody lips.

“You rotten fucking bastard,” he sneers. “I’m gonna break your fucking neck for that.”

The crowd’s almost still now, tense and fascinated. Sean wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, and smells the hot iron stench of the other man’s blood.

“Yeh can bloody well try,” he growls, and every nerve and fiber and sinew in his young body is aflame, and God he hasn’t felt his own blood singing in his veins like this for far too long.

They fly at each other, fists swinging, and Sean lands a solid punch on the other man’s chin, though the slip of blood under his knuckles sends his fist skittering and some of the force is lost. The counterblow lands just below his left eye, and the day turns whitely dark for an instant, and then washes red. A woman cries out, sharp and scared. Sean shakes his head hard, knocking himself back into focus just in time to dodge a second blow.

He falls back, wincing at the pain of his split cheek, then lunges in again to catch the other man squarely under the ribs with his shoulder, driving him back into the corner post. A man shouts wordless encouragement to one or other or both of them. The fighter grabs Sean again, his thick fingers biting deep into the thin skim of muscle and flesh clothing Sean’s ribs. Sean hisses in pain, but forces himself to stay focused on drawing back his fist. Abruptly the fighter belts his head into Sean’s face, and everything goes dark red and smells like the coke ashes in the furnace pans.

Sean staggers back, almost retching with pain, snorting and swallowing mouthfuls of blood.

“Kill ‘im,” a woman shrieks, and Sean doesn’t know if she means him or the fighter. Bloody bitch probably doesn’t know herself, he thinks.

The fighter comes at him again, and Sean knows he can’t win, can’t stop the bastard from killing him if that’s what he wants. He lifts his arms though they feel like lead, trying to block the punch that he can see coming from a great distance but can’t seem to avoid, not with the weight of his own blood pooling in the pit of his stomach pinning him in place.

The blow across his jaw is almost a mercy, the hammer stroke of doom. Sean sways on his feet, the ground far far away but beckoning to him like the angels’ arms and there’s the bell tolling for him so loudly his skull is going to split if it doesn’t stop and God’s blood he wishes the lock on his knees would just give so he could fall down and have a bit of a rest.

The crowd erupts into cheers and catcalls and crowing shouts of delight and disgust and the barker grabs Sean’s right wrist and wrenches his hand up over his head and there’s something round and cool and metallic being pushed into his blood-sticky palm and he curls his fingers tight round whatever it is and he’ll have a look at that in a bit, after he’s …

… his knees turn liquid and the world, already crimson, darkens even more and the ground comes at him swift and cruel and …

… he never feels it hit.


	3. Cardiff, Whales - 1857

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sean - Backstory

  
Catherine has hair like a river of black satin. Sometimes, when she and Sean make love, she caresses his bare skin with handfuls of the cool silky strands. Sean feels something swell inside his chest, pressing insistently at his breastbone, and he promises himself that he will never, ever leave her.

Catherine has velvet skin and sleek muscles. She twines her limbs tightly around Sean, and twists her fingers in the unruly waves of his hair. Sean’s body moves smoothly against hers, his spine arching and flexing as he exhales kisses on her eyes and cheeks and lips.

“Dw i'n dy garu di,” he says huskily. “Dw i'n dy garu di.”

When his moment comes, when he buries his face in the dark spill of her hair against her pale throat and shudders himself out into her, he calls her Catherine, always Catherine, never Cathie or Cath or Cate or Cat, though they’re all names she answers to from others.

Afterwards, lying tangled together in the narrow bed, Sean takes her hand in his. He circles the ball of his thumb over the line of calluses at the top of her palm, where the reins have rubbed her skin hard. He weaves their fingers together, turning their hands to consider the skin always split and healing and thickening on his own knuckles. He tightens his grip a little, as if to impress on them both the feeling of their hands clasped together.

Cut.

“What’s the matter?” Sean asks, emerging from the caravan, barefoot and in his shirtsleeves, to find Catherine holding her horse by the mane and scowling at the near foreleg.

“It feels like she’s off this foot when she canters, but there was nothing to see when I scraped the shoe out,” Catherine says.

Sean is half listening, but wholly watching Catherine. For her turn in the circus ring she wears a get-up that’d rightly get her stoned in the streets of Sheffield - a spangled corset and a bit of skirt that hardly hides her hips and makes Sean wild to get her alone. But to him, she’s every bit as inflammatory now, in her soft cotton shirt-waist and her dark riding skirt.

“Hop up there and take her around, ‘til I see how she looks from a way off,” Catherine goes on.

“Right so,” Sean shrugs.

He smoothes his palm down the animal’s bare back, then takes hold of a handful of coarse mane and swings himself up. He tilts to one side, his right heel just whispering against the animal’s dappled flank, and the horse obediently wheels and trots off across the scrubby grass of the fairground.

With another slight shift of his weight, Sean circles the horse around Catherine. Sean touches both heels to the mare’s sides, and she springs forward into a canter.

“Do you feel it?” Catherine calls.

“Aye, I do alright,” Sean answers, noting the faintest unevenness in the animal’s stride.

“Switch her off onto the other foot.”

Sean presses his knees into the mare’s ribs and drops his hand down on one side of her neck, and she does a little skip and switches from leading with her near to her off foreleg.

“It’s only when she leads on that side,” Sean says over the thrum of the horse’s hooves and the ruffle of air through his clothes.

He repeats the switch, his hand dropping to the other side of the horse’s neck. The mare changes feet again. Sean makes the same maneuver half a dozen times more, and sure enough her gait is smooth as silk when she’s on the off leg, and develops an odd little hitch when she’s on the near one.

“Is there anything to see?” Sean asks, looking at Catherine.

She’s watching him, not the horse’s hooves.

“Oh, there is alright,” she smiles.

“What’s that?” Sean grins in response, gathering the mare back to a trot and then a walk, and guiding her back to where Catherine’s standing.

“A town mouse, that rides a bit better than a sack of coal,” Catherine says, her dark eyes glittering with fond pride.

“I thought you said the sack of coal rode better.”

“That was weeks ago. You’ve improved. You know how to please her now.”

Sean swings his leg over the mare’s withers and slides off her back. He’s breathless and a little flushed from the exercise.

“I’m glad to hear it. What do yeh figure about the hoof?”

“I’ll let her rest for today.”

“So yeh’re goin’ teh ride that young bugger of a stallion instead? He doesn’t know half your tricks yet.”

Catherine moves in closer, so that Sean’s pinned between her and the mare’s side.

“He’s eager, and he learns fast,” she smiles.

Sean slips his arm around Catherine’s waist and hides his blush in her dark ringlets.

Cut.

“Dw i'n dy garu di,” he tells her, a dozen times a day. “Dw i'n dy garu di, Catherine.”

And for almost a year, it’s enough. Sean makes no promises to her, but despite the dimpling smiles of the girls who press eagerly around the ropes of the boxing ring, Sean hardly waits to wash the blood - some his, but mostly other men’s - off his face and hands before he goes back to the caravan he and Catherine share. He makes off-hand remarks about the third horse they’ll buy her next summer, or the new caravan they might get in a couple of years, or the bit of a house they’ll want when they’re too bloody old for this life.

And then, one night, he tells her, “dw i'n dy garu di,” and she answers:

“So ask me to marry you.”

Sean stares at her in undisguised dismay for a long moment before he’s able to summon a smile.

“Ah, what would I want to go an’ do that for? Aren’t we grand as we are? Marriage is for them that’s stuck in a row house and a factory job and a city they never see the outside of. We’re fairground folk; we’re tinkers and wanderers and outlaws. What the hell do we need their bit o’ paper and their say so for?”

She lets it go that time, smiling at him with her hot dark eyes, and taking him into her arms. But now when he comes back to the caravan after a bout, she acts as if she’s surprised to see him.

“There’s no need for you to run back here every time you’ve got a minute,” she says sweetly. “I don’t own you, you know.”

When he talks about the future, she listens and smiles, and when he’s done she shrugs it off and says, “well, we’ll see, if you’re still around then that’d be nice all right.”

They’ve done nothing about avoiding a baby, but nothing’s come of it either. Sean sometimes wonders if he’s uncommonly lucky, or if maybe there’s something wrong with him, that he didn't make Kate or Catherine pregnant for all the pleasure he's had from them. So it’s nothing short of a slap in the face when Catherine produces a handkerchief of whisper-thin tight-woven silk and asks him to use it to cover himself when he’s in her.

“I don’t want to just trust to luck anymore,” Catherine says coldly. “You have to understand, it mightn’t matter to you, but what am I going to do if I’m caught with a baby and you’re gone off to God knows where?”

“Don’t bother your head about it,” Sean snarls. “You needn’t worry about catching any baby from me. May God strike me bloody dead if I have you again.”

He slams out, and that day he fights like a fury and beats the man who beat the champion of all England, earning himself a purse of twenty golden guineas and a black eye. And when the girls with their bonnets and curls and glittering eyes crowd around him, he picks out the one with the fairest hair and lightest eyes. He offers to show her around the fairground attractions, and in the straw behind the lions’ cage he pushes her down and bundles up her skirts and fucks her until she cries out sharp and high and swears she’d throw her husband over for him in a second if he’d have her.

In the evening, he goes back to Catherine. She yells at him, spits at him, curses him to hell when she sees another woman’s claw-marks on his sun-tanned shoulders. Sean bites his lip and curls his fists into his armpits, and hangs his head. When she’s finally exhausted herself, he takes her in his arms and tells her:

“Dw i'n dy garu di.”

He caresses her, taking her clothes off with tender care and lavishing kisses on every inch of her skin. When he’s lying over her, about to enter her, he reaches for the silk handkerchief. It makes their lovemaking feel strange and distant, but he does it anyway.

There are other arguments, about everything and nothing, and there are other women. Summer turns to autumn, and autumn to winter. The carnival works its way east into England, and finally all the way to London for the Christmas festivities. Sean hasn’t fought a farm-boy or a brick-carrier for months; it’s all professionals like him now. The bouts are harder, but the prizes are bigger and the victories sweeter.

The first week in January, some gent with a silver-topped cane and perfumed whiskers offers Sean one hundred pounds if he can beat a bruiser twice his size. Sean wins the fight in six vicious rounds, and brings the money back to Catherine, spilling the ten crisp banknotes into her lap.

“Whatever you want, love, it’s yours,” he says, drunk on exhaustion and exaltation.

“A wedding ring.”

Sean steps back, wiping his hand across his mouth and then glancing at his fingers as if expecting to see blood there.

“I can’t,” he admits at last. “I’m already married. I have a wife, livin’ in Sheffield.”

Catherine stands, the hundred pounds fluttering to the floor.

“Then you’ve made me a whore,” she says coldly. “And I’ll thank you to take your trade elsewhere.”

Cut.

The weather turns unseasonably mild the following week, and the carnival moves on in the hopes of turning some business before the start of the yearly round of spring fairs. Sean remains in London alone.


	4. Lessons: Billy, outside Austin, 1867

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Billy - Backstory

Stupid. So stupid.

He doesn't know how long he's been riding. Long enough for the night wind to make the wet patches on his shirt as cold as ice; not long enough to dry them. Distantly, he can feel each hoofbeat pounding through his swollen eye, his aching jaw, throbbing in the place on his ribs that may or may not be broken. It's all at a remove, though-ghostly, faded-and only the memory of pain and damage tells him that it hurts. They jump a low rock that Billy doesn't even see until they're leaping over it, and the landing flicks foam off the horse's neck and onto Billy's hands. He needs to stop soon, before he founders the mare or lames her. Galloping across the Texas countryside, even on a full moon night, is the most damn-fool thing he could be doing.

Well. One of them, anyway.

His first tournament. Only his thirteenth real game, and the first one against players who held the cards like they mattered. The first time he played for stakes. Not true players (he wouldn't have dared, yet), not big money (he couldn't have afforded the entrance). The saloon so decrepit they didn't even make him change his shirt before sitting down at the table-one of the only reasons he'd been able to do it, because that shirt was caked with four days' travel and camoflaged the fact that he hasn't yet taught himself how not to start sweating. Youngest at the table by five years at least, and so green his voice cracked when he paid for his chips. So green that when he pulled the chair back, he thought the weight of the eyes on him would snap him like a twig. His first tournament. And he won it.

Stupid.

One of the shapes in the corner of his eye catches at him, and he turns his head just in time to resolve it into a trough and a water pump, shining dully in the moonlight. He hauls the reins right and the horse wheels, neighing, kicking up dust. He's got just enough care left to bring her to down to a trot before they reach it, and when he swings down out of the saddle, his left knee buckles under him and he hits the ground.

Should've left town the moment he'd cashed his chips, soon as the tournament was over. He shouldn't have let the surprise sucker him into a celebratory shot, a mug of beer, a round traded with the older man who'd unpatronizingly returned his jacket to him after he left it on the chair at the poker table. He shouldn't've forgotten what his pa used to tell him: that money never makes you safer, it only makes you feel more secure when you've really just painted a target on your barn door.

For half a minute he just lays there, flat on his back and half-under the horse, perfectly placed to be kicked or trampled. The dust is dry and sharp in his mouth. A rock is digging into his lower back. He stares up at the swinging stirrup, the sky beyond it, and doesn't think, and breathes. As his chest rises, a sharp pain lances through his ribs, and when he automatically presses his hand against the hurt, his palm comes away sticky. Then he remembers. He's standing before he realizes he's moved.

They caught him in the street outside the saloon, only slightly liquored up but still half-drunk on victory. Two slapping through the half-doors behind him (stupid, he'd even seen them in there killing time, should've thought), boisterous and arguing amiably, any two ranch hands stumbling past on their night off-up until they grabbed his arms and dragged him up a side street. Suddenly not as drunk as they sounded, sober enough that none of his struggling got him free. The third, just a silhouette punctuated by the red glow of a cigarette, until he stepped out of the building's shadow and called cheerfully, _"Now, kid, I was watching you while we was at the poker table, and you sure played good, but your parents seem to have skipped a couple real important lessons. And on account of your youth and all, me and the boys here--"_ snickers from his right and left _"--thought we'd do you a favor."_

He stopped right in front of Billy, took a slow, thoughtful drag, and then flicked the burning butt right into Billy's face. Billy jerked convulsively away from it, and the first fist slammed the air out of his chest.

 _"Lesson one. Don't take what doesn't belong to you."_

Reaching out to grasp the handle of the water pump sends pain like lightning through him, but the knowledge of the dampness clinging to clothes and hands overrides it. He jerks the handle furiously up and down, and water dumps out into the trough. The mare shoves up next to him to lap greedily at the first splashes, but he keeps pumping, past the point where he's bitten through his lip with the effort, until minutes later when water sloshes out and soaks the lower legs of his jeans. Breath coming in harsh, shallow gasps, he yanks the shirt over his head one-handed, dunks it in the icy liquid, and begins frantically scrubbing at the skin of his back and chest.

He'd been in fights before, but only once like this, outnumbered and pinned and unable to throw a single punch. For the barest moment, between the second and third hit, he'd thought _\-- the saloon, we're right beside it, someone will come, will see --_ but he wasn't dumb enough to hold that hope for long. In towns like this, you assumed a person in Billy's position was getting what he deserved, and if you saw fit to interfere, you'd likely get what he deserved as well. By the fourth kick, there was nothing but the struggle to breathe, to keep his eyes open and see where the next blow was coming, nothing but the pain. They stopped when he couldn't stand on his own.

Out of breath, the leader laughed and tossed his jacket to the second man, who let go of Billy to catch it. Billy staggered and almost fell, and the third man swore and scrambled to keep ahold of him. Arms now pinned across protesting ribs in a grip meant as much to support as to restrain, he blinked through the blood as the man in front of him flexed his hands and took a couple steps backward. _"I 'spect you figured out that we'll be taking that money back from you, as it's rightfully ours-- some of it, anyway ..."_ This prompted a humid puff of amusement against the back of Billy's neck; the man spat emphatically and continued, _"But lesson two is that nothing comes for free, and schooling's expensive, so we'll be taking payment for that out of your hide."_

He reached behind his back, fumbled with something, and there was a sudden whistle and crack as he snapped his arm out straight. A whip. The clouds shifted, bathing the four of them in cold blue light. The man chuckled and shook his head. _"Pretty little boy, aren'cha?"_ he mused. _"Maybe I won't cut you up too bad, then-- I reckon the boys and I can think of a few good uses for that sweet little mouth."_ His grin sliced light through the darkness, and Billy's vision wavered as with heat on parched earth, ears ringing faintly: the hollers of an angry mob, the crack of a whip, his brother screaming his name ... and another grin like that, handsome and easy and evil, light off a silver badge ...

Billy coughed and hissed: _"Urban."_ The man in front of him frowned, started to speak, and Billy dropped forward across his own arms. As the man behind him grunted and shifted to catch him, he snapped his right hand around the revolver on his left hip, yanked it from the holster, and fired it backward. The explosion slammed the metal barrel against ribs already burning, and hot liquid bloomed over his back as the man behind him staggered and hit the ground. Half-blinded by blood and shock, Billy felt himself cock the hammer back even as his knees started to buckle and give. He shot the man to his left, bullet piercing through the jacket he held in front of him, an ineffectual shield, and recocked the gun as he swung it to point at the man in front of him. The man gaped at him, whip dangling loose from one hand. Billy swayed and shot him. They hit the ground at the same time.

His skin feels rubbed raw by the time the wind picks up and his hands start shaking so badly that he drops the shirt into the dust. On instinct, he bends to retrieve it, and the sharp stab in his side makes him grab the water trough to keep from falling. The intensifying cold shocks him out of his numbed state, and he's suddenly aware that he's half-frozen, more badly injured than he's ever been in his life, stuck in the desert with an exhausted horse, and trespassing. His head clears as the need for survival reasserts itself, and he takes a careful breath, straightens, and takes the horse's bridle in one hand. There's a boulder just visible a hundred yards away; he'll bed down on the far side for the night and ride out at dawn before anyone might see him.

Next time, he'll leave the saloon as soon as the game's over, head out while it's still light. He'll check the room when he cashes his chips, look behind him as he leaves. He'll tie his horse right outside the door, so he can mount up and ride away. He'll hold the gun farther from his body, get his feet under him before he fires. Next time, he'll wash the blood out in the daylight, when the sun can bake his clothing dry and he can see the stains.


	5. Questions: Lando, Billy, West Texas, 1872

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=wanted2.png)

Maybe he falls completely asleep for a few minutes or maybe Orlando just tunes the clatter of it out, but the next sound he’s aware of is an odd flickering, a whisk-y kind of noise. He almost rolls over on his side and ignores it, but it goes on for around thirty seconds, and eventually he’s curious enough to open his eyes and find out what it is.

Cards. Billy is shuffling cards, doing it almost absently. He’s got his back propped against the bulk of his saddle and one knee cocked up, boot heel dug firmly into the sandy west-Texas soil. His other leg is stretched out in front of him, the sole of his boot inches from the fire he’s staring into. His hands seem to be moving on their own, shuffling the deck, bridging it back together, again and again. Orlando can’t tell if Billy is thinking hard or not thinking at all. His face is expressionless, calm.

Orlando hasn’t really been able to figure Billy out that much. He’s stopped asking questions about Billy, though. Billy just looks at him, when he asks, brows level and eyes veiled.

“You talk too much, kid,” he’d said once, and Orlando had been so stung he’d snapped his mouth shut and bit his tongue. He’s pretty sure Billy had noticed, but he hadn’t said anything, much to Orlando’s relief.

He’ll mostly answer about trivial things, though.

“What are you doing?” he asks, and Billy’s gaze shifts away from the fire, focusing on Orlando slowly, like he’d been miles away. His lips flicker, something that might almost be a smile. The first one Orlando has seen from Billy, and whether it really counts or not, Orlando grins back, big and wide and probably pretty stupid looking, he thinks, but he can’t stop it.

He likes Billy, and he isn’t sure at all that Billy likes him. Even an almost-smile is better than a bland expression or a quirked eyebrow (which always seems to communicate Billy’s aggravation at Orlando’s babbling, whether that’s what it really means or not).

Billy feels his cheeks shift against his teeth, one of the interior expressions that replaced more public displays years ago, and sends the cards skimming from one hand to the other. _Shuffling,_ he thinks about saying, but doesn’t. After all, the kid’s trying; instead of voicing every question that pops into his head, he’s started just staring at Billy hard enough to wear holes through saddle leather whenever he’s curious. Not a lot more subtle, granted, but still an improvement.

He flips the deck into a bridge and shifts his gaze back to the fire. “Feeling the cards,” he says, and resists the smirk that rises unbidden as he senses more than sees Orlando’s eyebrows start to climb toward his hairline. “You need to practice when you’re on the road, make sure you can move them just right every time. Otherwise, you’ll shift them in your hand next time you play, and you’ll do it more when the stakes are higher.”

Orlando props himself up on one arm, frowning a little. “What happens if you shift them?” he asks.

This time, Billy lets his eyebrow arch upward like it wants to and turns his head to watch a familiar flush rise and burn across the kid’s face. Dryly, he answers, “You lose.”

Orlando manages not to avert his gaze in spite of the heated flush he can feel staining his face and neck. He’s going to have to get used to it sooner or later, going to have to learn to ignore the tone of Billy’s voice, which always sounds faintly mocking (he’s almost sure it actually _is_ faintly mocking, but thinking that seems unfair and uncharitable, and his mother would chide him for it) to Orlando.

For long moments, he can’t think of anything to say to follow that up. It seems almost designed to end the conversation, and Orlando still isn’t sure if Billy does that on purpose, or if he’s just not used to actually carrying on conversations. Almost everything Billy says seems designed to end a conversation, and though he’s never actually _told_ Orlando to shut up, not in those precise words, Orlando isn’t a complete idiot.

He bites his lip and steals a look at Billy from the corner of his eye.

He’s still making the cards do improbable things between his hands, using quick, precise gestures that don’t look like they require enough effort to produce the results they are getting. He watches, fascinated (forgetting to be surreptitious) until he can see the tiny motions behind the movements, the way Billy’s smallest finger tucks up under the deck when he splays the cards from one hand to the other, steadying and directing it, the way his wrist snaps and his fingers tent against the dully gleaming surface of the cards.

 _I could do that,_ he thinks, and he’s pretty sure of it. It doesn’t even look as complicated as knitting, and his mum had taught him to do that in a couple of hours. He has always been good with his hands.

Billy is watching Orlando watching _him_ , and Orlando can feel heat coming back to his face again at being caught staring. Almost defensively, he says, “I think I can do that,” and holds his hand out for the deck.

Billy almost-smiles again, up goes his eyebrow, and the dull heat in Orlando’s face makes him feel almost angry, more at himself than Billy (because he’s the half-wit that can’t take a little amusement at his expense without blushing like a stupid kid). “Do you now?” Billy says, and there is no mistaking the indulgent disbelief in his tone as he hands Orlando the deck.

He ignores it as much as he can, arranging his hands in careful imitation of Billy’s, and flexes the cards carefully between them for a moment, feeling them in what is a not-completely-unconscious reaction to what Billy had said earlier), just to get used to their texture and weight and density. It isn’t much different than getting used to the weight and slide-snick-slip-slide of the knitting needles, and it only takes him a moment to feel confident with them, to be sure he knows how they will act in his hands.

He shuffles once, twice, quick and easy, bridges them neatly on the third shuffle, and then twists his wrist (another conscious imitation of Billy’s neat, precise movements) and they arc neatly through the air from right hand to left, making a noise like the hoof beats of a cantering horse in miniature, perfect rhythm, perfect speed, which Orlando finds completely and imminently satisfying. He beams, pleased with himself, and looks at Billy again (not without some hope of seeing surprise or approval or something other than mocking amusement in his face).

Billy hadn’t expected the kid to ask for the cards, and he certainly hadn’t expected anything to come of it (except maybe an half-hour cleaning the dust out of his deck), so what he’s seeing ... when Orlando flips the cards flawlessly between his hands, Billy’s so surprised that he forgets to breathe for a moment. He’d spent two weeks practicing that trick (hour after hour, rough rock against his back, the deck he’d stolen from the general store scuffed and dirty in his sticky hands) before he could manage it without fumbling, and it took another month before he looked half that smooth at it. And the kid just...

This changes things. Billy’d picked Orlando up off the side of the road without stopping to think about it (uncharacteristic, that, and he’s wanted to kick himself for it a few times since), and he’s spent the past few weeks wondering what he was going to do with him. Martha always needed more hands out at her ranch, and he’d more or less made up his mind to pass the kid over to her, but ... no. He’s not about to leave him to a life of dumb, hard labor. Not when his hands can do _that_.

Not if Billy can teach him.

He’s got his face back under control by the time Orlando looks back up, now flushed with pleasure and so eager for approval that Billy feels an old ache twist at the sight. When he was younger than the kid is now, his brother Jack rescued a puppy from a trio of local bullies, a mangy mutt he christened Stick who followed him everywhere. Whenever Jack’d talk to Stick, the mere fact of Jack’s attention would make Stick beat her tail against the ground in stupid happiness. Orlando’s looking at Billy like that now.

“You move your fingers too much.” First thing that pops into his head, and Billy curses silently when the kid’s grin fades and falls in on itself-- _nice work, you sour shit_.

“A good player watches for any extra movement, because that’s what gives your hand away.” The kid drops his gaze to a hole in his jeans, and Billy suppresses a grimace and scoots closer.

“Here, watch,” he says, taking the deck back and knocking it once against his palm.

“What you did was this—“ he arcs the cards across, letting his fingers flicker out, fan-like, into full extension—“but all you need to do is this—“ and then arcs the cards back with the economy of motion that took him so long to master, that now comes like breathing. “You see the difference?”

Orlando nods, and Billy holds the deck out to him. “Think you can do it right?”

 

Orlando hesitates for a moment before taking the deck, because now he’s bloody nervous. He does take it, though, after he wipes his clammy palms on his denims.

He doesn’t look at Billy. He doesn’t want to see if he noticed that nervous little gesture (which he thinks is pretty likely); knowing that he had will only make Orlando more nervous.

Instead he thinks hard about the placement of Billy’s hand on the deck -- it helps that Billy had been very specific when he had shown Orlando the difference, makes it lots easier to feel the difference when he handles the cards -- and works his fingers carefully into an identical configuration.

 _Nothing showy_ , he thinks, worrying at his bottom lip a little. _Subtle, go for subtle_. Which makes sense, if it’s something Billy does deliberately, something he wants to make look easy. Like intimidation, without the bullying part. Intimidating the other players with sheer confidence. Yeah.

He breaks the deck, shuffles it once, just to be sure his hands aren’t sweating enough to change the way the cards move, and then sprays them neatly into his waiting left hand.

Easy.

He doesn’t look up right away this time, though. He does it again, instead, and then again, because repetition is the key to getting it right every time, making his fingers remember the subtleties of the motion as well as the mechanics.

With the first attempt, Billy can see that Orlando’s understood. When he doesn’t stop, but keeps sending the deck from hand to hand, it becomes slowly clear that he’s learned a deeper lesson, one Billy hadn’t been consciously trying to teach him. He’s not just doing it for Billy’s approval, or to show how clever he is. The kid’s doing it for the mastery. And Billy watches him shoot the cards back and forth, two minutes, ten, smoothing the imperfections that could give his thoughts away, until each pass is as sleek and merciless as train wheels down a track. Billy watches and thinks, _I can make a poker player out of him_.

When the first telltale tremor of muscle fatigue appears (left pinky, unavoidable for a beginner), he drops one hand lightly onto the kid’s shoulders and the kid stills immediately, obedient. Gently, Billy reaches down to reclaim the deck, and when Orlando looks up at him, Billy lets the smile stay on his face.

“Not bad,” he tells him. “Not bad.”

The smile is a helpless reaction. He can feel it stretching his cheeks and revealing his teeth and warming his chest.

Okay, great. Billy is smiling, and his eyes are more expressive than his words. Orlando thinks he looks interested, maybe for the first time, in Orlando. Like Orlando has surprised him, which is just fine with him.

“It’s not that hard,” he says, cocking his head to look at Billy slightly sideways, considering the expression on his face. Billy is looking at the cards again. The smile had fallen away from his face nearly as soon as he had looked down, and now he’s frowningly focused -- not like he’s actually _frowning_ , more like he’s just concentrating, and he’s the sort of bloke that frowns when he’s doing that -- and turning the deck over and over in his hands.

“Do you win a lot?” Orlando asks, a little tentatively. “Are you really good? How did you learn how to play? Is it hard?”

He stops when he hears how he sounds, young and stupid, and shifts against his bedroll.

Billy’s grateful when the kid _(Orlando, time to start using his name, Boyd)_ cuts himself off, because it’s been ... a long time, since he’s kept any company but his own. He stares into the fire and cuts the deck, trying to remember how this goes. Conversation. He knew how to do it, once.

”I learned the rules from some ranch hands, when I was a couple years younger than you are,” he says, slowly, feeding one stack of cards back into the other by touch. “I learned how to play by watching. Took a year before I ever sat down at a table. These days, I win more often than I lose.” He cuts again, sifts the cards together. Tries to remember the questions Orlando had asked—did that cover it?

No. There was one more. A big one. He slides the deck back into a neat stack and folds his hands around it, thinking.

”Poker, real poker ... s’never easy. If you sit down at the table and it’s a game, or it’s a job ... you’ll lose. Not every time, but when it counts, you’ll lose. There’s a truth to poker—it shows everyone the way they really are. When you learn to see that ... that’s when you know how to play.”

Billy trails off, uncomfortable. He’s never tried to put this in words before. No one’s ever asked. Carefully, he slides the cards back into their case and tucks them into the leather satchel, feeling Orlando’s eyes locked on him as he ties the cord shut.

When Billy weaves the cards together -- not normal shuffling, just shifting the deck into two loose piles and sort of sliding them together, frictionless -- his thumbs drive most of the motion while the rest of his fingers form a careful cradle for each half of the deck. Orlando watches, his own fingers twitching involuntarily, paying as much attention to Billy’s hands as to his words, until he stops talking entirely and stows his deck -- he handles it carefully, the same way he handles his guns, which Orlando thinks is probably telling, although he’s not really sure what it tells.

Billy has compact, deft hands -- nothing like Orlando’s, which are a little too big for the rest of his body, with long, slim fingers and hard ridges of callused skin across his palms just below the fingers from roping and bailing and fencing -- which Orlando finds frankly fascinating.

They don’t look like they should be as dexterous as Orlando has just seen them proven to be. Like Billy, actually, who is probably five or six inches shorter than Orlando, and slim, but had hauled Orlando up onto the back of his horse (that day, the day he’d left home) like Orlando weighed no more than a girl.

He’s always known that appearances can be deceiving. His stepfather, for example, is a handsome man from back East. He has fine manners, is well liked by their neighbors, loved by Orlando’s mother (who is by no means a stupid woman), and respected in the tight knit community of ranchers that had known and liked Orlando’s father.

He is also means as a snake, unkind to horses, and had hated eight-year old Orlando for no reason other than that he was not his son, and yet would inherit the ranch eventually, anyway.

He likes Billy -- maybe that was inevitable, since Billy had taken Orlando along with him for no reason other than that Orlando’d had nowhere else to go -- but he’s been thinking of Billy as a fairly simple bloke. Not stupid, not by any means, but not... well, not deep.

But maybe that isn’t true at all.

He wants to ask Billy to teach him to play, but he has the idea that saying that right now might be a bit too sudden. Maybe saying it at all would be a bad idea. Hard to say. He’s never met anyone before that took weeks to warm up enough to even talk to him, and he doesn’t know how to behave with someone like that.

”When it counts?” he asks carefully, not looking at Billy at all, because he’s afraid what he actually wants to say will show on his face. “That means when it’s for money?”

There’s a pause, which might mean that Billy’s thinking about it, or it might mean that the conversation, such as it had been, is already over and Orlando just hadn’t realized it. He threads his hands together on top of one bent knee and scratches at the denim with the nails of both thumbs, listening to the rough whisk of the weave in the still air. Finally, Billy says: “Usually that’s when it counts. Not just money, but for High Stakes.”

 _High Stakes,_ Orlando thinks, pondering the words, and the way they sound when Billy says them, like they’re important. “Can you make a living at it?”

He glances over at Billy in spite of himself, but he can’t tell anything about Billy’s face in the yellow-orange flicker of the firelight. “Some can,” Billy says softly.

”Can you?"

There are two basic types of poker players, at least at the upper levels. Confidence men, who use charm and flash to intimidate, false personalities as a form of misdirection. They'll patter on about the tournaments they won and the whores who bedded them for it, all the while dropping eight different tells, and the moment you let the front sucker you, you've lost. And then there are the stone men, who never count their chips or rearrange their cards and generally act like each extra movement costs a dollar.

Billy is one of the silent ones, to a point. He knows how to play intimidation games with words, and it's won him tournaments more than once, but his stock in trade is the iron stillness that makes even the best confidence men start to sweat. "More like a gun than a rock," Martha told him last time he rode through, and he supposes she's right. There's a line between inscrutability and naked threat. He's made a career of straddling it. And Orlando doesn't know this, but one of the rules all stone men privately keep is that you never talk about your game. That's for the confidence men to do, and as soon as you let yourself fall into their patterns, you might as well lay your hand out and leave the table. For stone men, it's an almost religious superstitious-- trade your edge for pride just once, and you're gone.

But if he's going to teach Orlando, he's going to have to talk about this. No way around it. Billy digs into his back pocket for the tobacco pouch and papers and starts rolling himself a cigarette. "I have," he tells him, not looking up from the task at hand.

Billy's hands rolling a cigarette are just as deft and certain as Billy's hands with a deck of cards in them. When he's finished he has a slim, pale cylinder, tightly rolled. He doesn't seem to have wasted a single flake of tobacco. He rolls it between his fingers for a moment, then slides it between his lips and retrieves a match from his shirt pocket, flicking it alight on the seam of his denims. In the flare of light from the match near his face, Orlando sees that Billy's eyes are still on him.

"Can I have one?" Orlando asks, on impulse. Billy blinks at him behind the veil of smoke, and then shrugs with one shoulder and hands Orlando the pouch and papers. "Thanks."

He isn't anywhere near as neat or quick as Billy, but he'd paid enough attention to be able to do a passable job.

"Then why were you working on my ... my stepfather's ranch," he asks eventually, when the cigarette is almost finished.

It's only a little pause, but it goes on long enough for Billy to wonder what's underneath. If Orlando had meant to say something else first, Billy wouldn't put money on "father" having been it. He picks up a smooth flat stone and turns it between his fingers.

"Sometimes, it's a few months between tournaments," he says evenly. "Hard to make the money last and keep enough for the entrance fee. Ranching's honest work; I don't mind it. What I grew up doing."

He's not quick enough to stop the last bit, though he masks the blink that wants to follow. Why the hell had he told the kid that?

Orlando's frowning a little, like he's adding up sums in his head and isn't sure they match. Whatever he's thinking, it's distracting him enough that Billy can actually watch the butt burn down and singe Orlando's fingers. He jumps, swearing a little (the faint accent's back, the one that only shoes up when he's preoccupied or upset), and fumbles to pinch it out. Billy hides a smile as the familiar flush rises in Orlando's cheek and looks blandly back at the fire.

"Aren't there ... low stakes games you could play in between?" Orlando's voice is unruffled enough, though Billy can see him shredding the offending butt out of the corner of his eye.

He nods and flips the stone across the backs of his knuckles. "Yep. But I don't like playing too often. They know my name, the bigger boys, and some of the smaller ones too. Better if not too many have a face to put to it." A memory flits across his mind unbidden-- _dark Austin street, rough hands hauling his shoulders back, a drunken laugh and a gunshot_ \-- and the night gets a little colder. "Better to play the smaller tables lightly. You win too easy, too often, some decide you're getting greedy."

He spits on a rock at the edge of the fire and listens to it sizzle.

"Trouble's expensive."

"Smaller games," Orlando says slowly, thinking out loud, "are probably more likely to attract men who can't afford to lose what they're betting."

Billy doesn't move or speak, but Orlando thinks he can feel Billy looking at him nevertheless. He stifles the urge to check and see, and then has to stifle an equally strong urge to fidget.

"Men playing for big money probably already have lots of money. So they're less likely to act like fools when they lose," he continues slowly. Which makes sense to him. If _he_ were playing, for example -- ignoring the fact that he has no money at all, of course -- chances were he'd be doing it with his last few dollars. Losing it would mean no food, no place to sleep other than the road. Losing it would be a big problem. It might drive him to do something desperate and foolhardy. Big money games were probably only really played by men that had enough money that losing it might be unpleasant, but not dangerous to their livelihoods.

"That's often true," Billy says. "Not always."

Orlando glances at him, but Billy isn't doing anything at all now, is just looking into the fire. If there is any expression at all on his face, it's too complicated to make out with the way the shadows jump and dance in this light. Although Orlando seriously doubts his ability to have figured out Billy's expression even if he'd had the full light of high noon to work with.

He ponders what to say for a while. It's like groping in the dark, trying to find the right words to keep a conversation with Billy going. Each sentence is like flicking a match lit and looking around wildly for a candle, something solid and steady that can be depended upon to keep the light going for a while.

His hands feel twitchy, as they often do when they're empty and he's nervous, and he has to concentrate hard to keep them still.

"I'd like to learn to play," he says finally (and it comes out sounding more like a challenge than a request), because he can't think of anything better to say, and because he's not patient enough to wait and hope that Billy offers -- and not at all certain that Billy would make such an offer anyhow -- and because he's getting a little impatient with Billy, too.

After all, he's not an idiot or a child. He'll admit being young (a young _man_ , thank you), and he knows he gets on Billy's nerves (his mum always says that he's like a barn full of kittens, cute, sometimes useful, but more likely to aggravate a body than actually serve any purpose) with all his questions, but he's getting bloody sick of working so hard to prove that he's neither stupid nor helpless. He knows it's partly his own fault -- he's been trying to avoid irritating Billy because the simple truth is, he doesn't _have_ anywhere else to go, and if Billy leaves him standing on the side of the road, he's likely to have some trouble getting along on his own -- but dammit, it's not like Billy's exactly easy to get on with, either, and he's sure not going out of his way to accommodate Orlando.

The tension in Orlando's voice is unmistakable, particularly to someone whose livelihood rests on his ability to correctly identify both nerves and aggressiveness. This already matters to Orlando. _Good_ , Billy thinks, satisfaction rising warm and subtle in his chest. He'd been wondering how long it would take Orlando to ask. If Billy had offered, there wouldn't have been any incentive, but if he thinks he's in Billy's debt for this, he'll work harder to prove he warrants the favor. Practiced deadpan firmly in place, Billy turns his head and lets the full weight of his gaze come to rest on Orlando, who stares defiantly back at him, lower jaw jutting slightly, obviously trying not to fidget.

He lets the silence ride for a minute, then snags his bedroll and tucks it under his head as he lies down. The multitude of stars shine crisply in the dark night sky. "We'll start tomorrow," he says.

 

 


	6. Practical Application: Billy, Lando, 1872

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=orlando-bloom-dog19.jpg)

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=nobill1-1.jpg)

Billy flips the new card ( _eight of clubs_ ) up, glances at it briefly, and then lays it face down on top of the folded stack in front of him. He learned years ago that the less he looks at his hand, the less he touches it, the more it tends to unnerve his opponents. Not that his current opponent poses any kind of a challenge.

But right now he's a hell of a lot more amusing to watch than the cards ever are, and Billy intends to remember every minute of this afternoon for years to come.

Orlando's frowning a little in concentration, but other than that, his face is as neutral and even as he ever gets it. It's impressive, really, how far he's come, only it's hard to be impressed by someone who's swaying one way while the cards he's holding sway another. A little more tequila sloshes out of the tumbler in his other hand, and Billy fights the urge to snicker.

 _"You'll need to play well under a lot of different circumstances,"_ he'd told Orlando that morning. " _Can't let your game slip because you're not at your best."_

 _"Besides, in some halls, you're expected to drink at the table."_

Blearily, Orlando's gaze swims back up to Billy's face. "I'll see your nickel," he slurs, taking another swallow of tequila, "and I'll raise you two bits.

The cards blur and shift in his hands. Orlando steadies them with deliberate concentration, because no shifting, shifting is bad. He distinctly remembers Billy saying so... one time... some time...

Wait, is it his turn? He glances up at Billy, and the room does an odd little motion blur thing, like when on the ranch he would ride, fast and far, so brassed at his stepfather that hot tears prickled at the backs of his eyes and he couldn't see anything but what was right in front of him, trusting his horse to keep him safe while his chest burned and his jaw ached with tension from clenching his teeth...

Wait, is it his turn? What was he doing?

Oh, looking at Billy, yeah. Billy isn't looking at him. Rather, he wasn't, but now he looks up and he is, and wow, his eyes are green. He isn't smiling, but he still looks amused, which changes the lines of his face into something less stern and harsh, even if it isn't a smile. Orlando doesn't smile back -- or look amused back, because it's not actually a smile, is it? -- because he's practicing looking neutral and bored.

 _Tequila is not good,_ he thinks carefully, but he takes another drink anyway, cause he'll be damned if he'll tell Billy that.

"See you," Billy says, sliding two bits into the center of the table. "Raise you," he adds, and slides another three forward. Orlando wonders if he's not naming his bet just to see if Orlando is too drunk to remember how to count.

Orlando considers his cards. Two pair is a damn good hand, which he knows in spite of the blur of his mind, which is pretty much obliterating everything else he knows. Seeing as one of the pairs is queens, it's a very good hand. He flickers his eyes up to Billy, but there's nothing there for him to read, as usual. Doesn't matter, though, as he's at the end of the round, and the only real choice now is to fold or call, and he's not going to fold with two pair.

He slides his three bits into the pot with a fingertip on each coin. "Call you, Bills," he says, and for a second, Billy's face flickers into open amusement. Orlando arches one brow pointedly, and makes a come on gesture with two fingers. There's a grin lurking in his chest, but he keeps it there, with effort.

 _Bills, is it?_ he thinks, eyeing the bottle. Orlando's definitely had enough to justify the occasional consonant swaps (which he doesn't seem to have noticed he's doing), but this sounds to Billy like something Orlando might've been using in his head for a while now. Oddly, he finds that he likes it.

He reaches out and flips his hand, fanning it out neatly as he does. Laying the cards out one by one is showboating, a amateur's confidence trick, and it's a habit he doesn't want Orlando picking up until he understands when (and when not) to use it. The hand is neither bad nor much -- pair of jacks, ace high -- but he's pretty sure he'll be taking this pot. While Orlando's ceased to wear every thought on his face, he's barely grasped the basics of bluffing. With the way he's been betting this hand (slow and steady), Billy's almost positive he's got a low pair and a case of alcohol-induced beginner's enthusiasm.

Orlando just sits there, staring fuzzily at the cards. The effort it's taking to keep a neutral face is visible, but the expression he's fighting off isn't. Billy makes a mental note to comment on it later, when he's sober enough to remember the praise. Now, though, he just leans forward and drawls lazily, "You gonna keep me waiting ... Lando?"

He's distracted by the nickname only for a second, because the enormity of the situation -- actually honest-to-Christ beating Bill Boyd at poker under his own merits -- just won't allow him to be distracted for long.

Poker is a drabble of luck and a pint of skill, Billy says, and while Orlando has won a couple of hands, he's never won a betting game, and he's never won during something that he's still sober enough to recognize as a test.

And he's never won without Billy knowing it long before Orlando had. And Billy doesn't know it, Orlando can tell. He can't read Billy -- that's still beyond him, and maybe it always will be -- but he _can_ sort of feel his confidence, that little bubble of certainty that Bills carries around with him, and it's firmly intact. He's expecting to win, not because of any skill of his own, but because of Orlando's _lack_ of skill.

He's never had to struggle to keep elation off his face before, and he's finding it a hell of a lot harder to repress than frustration or disappointment ever had been. The effort of it is surprisingly sobering, and he feels like he is almost thinking clearly.

"No," he says, and spreads his cards into a fan before easing them onto the table, face up, keeping his face still as he meets Billy's eyes. "But I believe I'll be hanging on to your thirty-one cents," and he waits for Billy's eyes to settle on the cards before he grins, and adds, "Bills."

Billy barely gives the cards time to register before he's replaying the last hand in his mind, and yes, yes, Orlando did it. Played the fives and queens close to the chest, bet wisely enough to keep Billy in the game, kept his calculations off his face, and did it well enough to win even after a pint of tequila. Pride surges up in him, warm and unfamiliar, and he lets out a bark of laughter and smacks one palm hard against the table. "Well played!"

When he looks up, Orlando's gaze is still blurry and a bit bewildered, but there's a wide, uncomplicated happiness breaking through his poker face like sun through afternoon clouds. Billy grins right back and gestures towards the little pile of coins in the center of the table. "Your pot," he pronounces, and Orlando blinks, looking a little disoriented. As he reaches for it, one long, loose arm smacks against the tequila bottle, and Billy has to dive to grab it before it hits the floor.

Orlando's beet red and halfway through a (slurred and accented) apology-- "Bugger, _bugger,_ Bills, I'm sorry--" but Billy waves him off.

"No harm done," he smiles, sticking the bottle safely on top of the dresser beside them, "though I think we'd best end the game now. Don't want you cleaning me out while we're between jobs."

"Yeah, alright," Orlando agrees, and relaxes somewhat, now that he's not trying to guard his face and his body to keep from giving away secrets. He slumps down in his chair and cocks one leg, hooking his boot heel on the edge of the chair and winding one arm around his bent knee. He's still holding the glass of tequila in one hand, and he considers it fuzzily for a few seconds. The slightly slippery warmth of the bitter alcohol softening the edges of things doesn't seem so bad, now that he's not trying to actually think through the haze of it, so he takes another cautious sip -- it's about the worst thing he's ever tasted, really, although truthfully it seems to taste better now than it had at first -- and it burns its way down his throat to warm his belly, which is nice, yeah.

Billy is gathering the cards up, his fingers quick and precise as ever as he flips them all so they're facing in the same direction, shuffles them twice, fast, and tucks them into their little wooden box. The cards go in the box, the box goes into a soft little pouch, and he's wondered before why Billy bothers with such things, if this particular deck has some sort of sentimental value to him, that he takes such good care of it. Billy has a couple of other decks, and _they_ don't have wooden boxes or deeply red velvet pouches. And Billy only uses _these_ cards himself -- although that's not true anymore, is it? No, Billy lets Orlando use them, now, though he didn't used to.

The thought draws a smile up, like it's coming from somewhere deep, somewhere below where the tequila is busily warming his belly, and he just looks at Billy, blinking softly, feeling just fine, warm and triumphant and, yeah, fine.

Billy glances up at him, pauses, his bright eyes flicking from Orlando's eyes to his smile, then to the glass of tequila in his hand before he smiles back, clearly amused at Orlando's expense, but Orlando can't be bothered to be embarrassed or irritated by it. "You're going to lose that," Billy says, and nods his head at Orlando's glass.

 _What?_ Orlando thinks, and looks, and sees that the glass of tequila is tilting rather precariously in the loose clasp of his hand. _Whoops!_ He tries to adjust his grasp, but the glass moves rather more sharply in the opposite direction in had been tilting than Orlando means it too, and tequila splashes up over the rim and across his wrist before he manages to right it.

"Bugger," he growls, and puts the glass safely down on the table, feeling cool liquid sliding up his arm. He turns his wrist and catches the droplets about midway up his forearm, spicy and mixed with the salty flavor of his own skin. He tracks them all the way down his wrist and across the webbing between thumb and forefinger, and hopes he managed to catch it all, otherwise he's likely to be all sticky with it.

Billy watches Orlando run a narrow pink tongue along the taut skin of his inner wrist and feels something hot and dark uncoil within him. It's been a long time since he's seen someone do that. Done that to someone else. Had it done to him. Not since before he picked Orlando up off the dusty road outside his stepfather's ranch. Months.

His mouth goes bone-dry and then slick with saliva as his mind supplies the taste ( _sun-baked skin, road dust, the double tang of alcohol spilled and sweated out through pores_ ) and texture (silk-soft, unyielding, pulled tight over angles of tendon and bone). He can already hear the sharp drop of breath down an open throat, feel the flesh jump and quiver under his lips. A very long time.

Out of sight, his hands clamp down on the seat of his chair hard enough to make the splintered edge bite into his fingers.

 _A kid,_ he snarls at himself fiercely, _just a kid-- no way to know what he wants yet, what he is._ And from the back of his mind, like velvet, like smoke-- _The same age you were, first time you did that. Years older than when you first knew you wanted it._ And he can feel that now, too-- the way his skin had jumped and sang, the pound of his heart against someone else's ribs, the fear, the need. Orlando skims his mouth along the curve of his thumb, and Billy almost runs his tongue along his lips.

Almost.

 _No, goddammit._ He can feel his throat form the words, hot and bitter. _Not now. Not when he's drunk, when he'll think you planned it._ Another image, unbidden, swirls up: that night in front of the campfire, Orlando's face when Billy said he'd teach him how to play. That smile, uncomplicated. Unbent. Unbroken. He grabs onto the memory, clings against the tide of want, and forces the mask back into place just as Orlando looks back up, eyes black-bright and quizzical.

"We should," Orlando says, and then loses track of what he'd been going to say because his boot heel slips off the edge of his seat abruptly, making him flail for balance until Bills grabs his arm and steadies him, because Bills is quick like that, and not clumsy at all the way Orlando is. Orlando beams widely at him -- "Hey, thanks, Bills," -- and repositions himself to be somewhat more stable, deciding that for now he'll leave both feet on the floor, as things seem to work considerably better that way.

Billy is smirking at him again, but Orlando can't really seem to mind it.

"We should what?" Billy asks, and Orlando smiles and cocks his head in question, and the room shifts very slightly, so he grips the edge of the table and that seems to work to still things.

"We should what?" Orlando echoes curiously and leans forward to rest his elbows on the table, which seems to work even better at making things still the way they ought to properly be. Billy chuckles, which does nice things to the corners of his eyes, makes them crinkly and a little unfamiliar, but in a good way, so Orlando chuckles, too. "We should go downstairs," Orlando says, "to the..." and he gestures downward, the word escaping him, "... to the thing, Bills, we should go down and..." He can't think of what he wants to do down there, though, and Billy's expression makes him think that Billy, at least, doesn't think Orlando's idea is a very good one, although Orlando can't think why. "It's still early," he says, by way of explanation. "Early, Bills."

"It's not, actually," Billy says, which makes Orlando glance over at the window, and apparently Billy is right, because there isn't any light showing out there, and Orlando could have sworn it was light out only a minute ago.

He slumps down in his chair, forgetting for a moment that he'd been using his elbows on the table to keep the world still, and when he does, Billy's face swims blearily in his vision, soft-edged and gentled, momentarily resembling the paintings Orlando's mum likes, portraits of women and men with soft edges and vaguely wistful expressions. He wonders what his mum is doing now, and that thought brings on a wave of homesickness so powerful it's like vertigo, and he closes his eyes until it passes.

It occurs to him that he's drunk, and that his mum would probably not be pleased, so he guesses it's probably a good thing he's here and not there, and that's totally aside from the fact that his step-father would probably react to discovering Orlando in such a state by beating him unconscious.

He frowns and opens his eyes, and Bills is looking at him and frowning a little -- he's always frowning a little, even when he's actually smiling -- and Orlando admits: "I think I'm drunk, Bills."

"I think you are, too," Billy murmurs, the residual heat from Orlando's arm still tingling in the palm of his hand. Somewhere in the last few seconds, Orlando's eyebrows have knit themselves together, and the hangdog look on his face makes Billy feel bizarrely like apologizing. Instead, he asks, "You been drunk before, Lando?"

Orlando shakes his head-- a bit too vigorously, based on the way he sways and grabs the table-- and scrubs one hand across his mouth. "No. 've drunk before, but not like this." He grimaces. "And not tequila."

Billy winces internally. "Don't care for it, do you?"

This time, he gets a languid hand wave in lieu of a headshake. "No. I mean, no, I don't _not_ like it, it's kind of ... something-- fun, that's the word, it's just ... every time I move, things aren't where I expect them to be."

He can't resist a snicker. "Things? Like the bottle?"

Orlando grins ruefully and slides a little further down in his chair. "More like my arms. My legs, too. Actually ..." He frowns thoughtfully and tilts his chin up to stare at the ceiling. "I'm not sure those are still attached."

That earns him an outright laugh.

He laughs because Billy is laughing, and actually he doesn't think he's ever heard Billy really laugh before.

It doesn't sound like he'd expected; not that he'd really expected anything, because Billy just doesn't laugh and he'd never really expected him to, but now that he has, it's unexpectedly... bright. Uncomplicated or something, which isn't a word that goes well with Billy in general, but seems to describe the sound of Billy laughing pretty accurately.

Bright.

He laughs again, and thinks, _Lando,_ because that's twice that Billy's said that, and he thinks he likes it. Knows he does, actually, because he hasn't had a nickname since he was a wee thing, and then it had just been a baby name, the kind of thing a boy has to leave behind once he starts school if he doesn't want the other boys to beat him up.

"When I was six," he says, and raises his head up from the back of his chair -- he doesn't actually remember leaning back so far that he couldn't see anything but the ceiling -- to look at Billy. "I couldn't be Orli anymore, you know? Because of school, and because it's a baby name, and so it was just Orlando, which is a pretty crap name anyhow." He smiles at Billy, and Billy doesn't actually smile back, but he seems to be listening, and he doesn't look like he usually does when he wants Orlando to shut the hell up, so Orlando decides to keep talking. It's Billy's stupid fault, after all, for giving him tequila.

He suspects he could blame tequila for all manner of things.

"Except at home, sometimes, my mum still called me Orli, like when I was sick with mumps, and when I had nightmares, sometimes, about my da. But then my mum married my step-father, and he didn't like the sound of it, and she didn't use it anymore."

He frowns slightly, and looks at Billy. Billy is frowning, too. He finds this vaguely encouraging, though he can't think why. "I hate him," he says.

He's never actually said it out loud before.

Billy doesn't say anything, but he gives a slow, solemn nod, which is very much a Billy thing to do, not bright like his laughter, but solid and dependable and honest, and that's just as good.

"He wouldn't like Lando, either," Orlando says, and lifts his glass to swallow what's left of the tequila.

It's bitter and warm.

"I like it," he says, and looks at the empty glass. "I like it, and I can use it if I want to."

A strange mixture of defiance, satisfaction, and old hurt radiates from Orlando like steam off of sun-baked river rocks. After so long at the tables, Billy finds he sees emotion in the space around a person as much as he does in their eyes, hands, or face. It disturbs him a little, sometimes. Emotion's not his preferred stock-- he's mastered it, because it's necessary, and learned to read it, because it's useful, but. He's not what he'd call comfortable with it. Not that he'd call it anything. Because this is not a conversation he'd have. So why is he having it with himself?

He shakes his head a little to dislodge the train of thought (and make the haze around Orlando, the one he knows he isn't really seeing, go away). _Pull it together, Boyd,_ he snaps at himself. _He's the drunk one, remember?_

But he can still feel Orlando there, lost and resigned to old memories. Because Orlando's like that, has been ever since Billy met him. Everything he feels just rolls off him in waves. Early on, it was one of the things that occasionally made Billy want to go back and thwap himself for rescuing the kid. Even during his infrequent silences, Billy could hear him thinking so loud that he might as well have kept yammering. It's different now, has been since he started teaching Orlando poker. He speaks less now (though still outtalks Billy about eight to one), and his face and body are calmer, quieter. Billy appreciates the effort, but privately (and very rarely) recognizes that it doesn't matter. He's never had a traveling companion before, and he finds he's too attuned now. The quieter Orlando gets, the more closely he catches himself listening.

"They called me William, sometimes. Back home." He's not aware of any desire to speak until he hears the words leave his mouth. "Ma, when I made her worry. Pa, when I did something that he knew'd make her worry. Jack, to rib me."

Orlando's staring at him now, keen eyes bright and much more focused then they were a moment ago. A distant part of Billy feels gratified to have knocked him out of it, but he's a little too dumbfounded to find himself talking about this to much care. While most of his mind is still occupied with: _What?_ his mouth apparently decides it isn't done yet.

"And after, to help me remember them."

 _Shit._

He spends a full ten seconds considering that, and even the dim haziness of his drunken mind doesn't fully cushion the impact of it.

Billy doesn't say things like that, doesn't _tell_ things like that, and Orlando -- _Lando,_ he thinks, _Lando is who I want to be and Lando is who I **will** be_ \-- doesn't know if it's a response to what _he_ had said (though it seems unlikely, since he talks about himself fairly often, and it's never brought about any form of reciprocation before) or if it's something else. Maybe he thinks Lando is too drunk to remember in the morning, and it's just something he needs to get off of his chest, and maybe he would have said it no matter what drunken idiot was with him when he needed to say it.

But he doesn't really think that.

 _After what, Bills?_ he asks, but he does it silently, because he knows better than that. He knows better than to ask, after being rebuffed so many times in the early days on the road, when his questions about Billy had been a lot more general than this one.

Still. His chest feels almost as warm and heavy with the knowledge that Bills had chosen to impart this little bit of himself, as oblique as it is, as his belly feels under the influence of the tequila, and he smiles slightly, though he knows enough to avert his eyes, so he isn't smiling directly at Billy. He wouldn't want to give the impression that he's smiling in the face of Billy's... pain, or whatever it is. And he's not, not at all.

"My mum used to use all three of my names when she was brassed at me," he says, eyes focused on the ceiling, but unsteadily. Tequila seems to affect his ability to focus properly, and he has to concentrate to keep his eyes from blurring out. "Orlando Francis Bloom," he intones, mock furious. "What were you thinking? Have you got naught but rocks in your head, boy!"

Billy chuckles quietly, and Lando chances a glance at him. He thinks the smile is genuine.

"Imagine the mortification, Bills!" He snorts. "Francis! Enough to get your nose bloodied if the other boys should happen to hear."

He sits up, rather too abruptly, it turns out, and even the table can't save him this time. He tumbles sideways, chair and all, letting out a little whoop of surprise that dissolves into a slew of hiccupy snickers that he can't seem to quite get under control.

Bills -- who hadn't even tried to save him, the bastard -- is smirking down at him. "Very effective maneuver," he says. "I encourage you to use that move in a game, Lando. It should send your competition into a fit of nerves. Especially the giggling."

"I'm not... bloody giggling," Lando protests, through a spate of giggles. Billy arches one eyebrow -- Lando wishes he could do that, maybe he'll practice when he's feeling a little more coordinated, it's a very expressive gesture -- at him, looking a bit like he's on the verge of laughing himself. "Oh, bugger off, then!" Lando grumbles, whapping at Billy's calf, which is the only place he can reach. "This is your fault anyway. Sodding tequila."

He scrambles around until he can get a good grip on Billy's trousers and drags himself into a semi-upright position by Billy's right knee. "Be a mate and help me up at least," Lando demands, and thumps Billy on the knee. "I need a piss!"

"I see I'll have to teach you how to hold your liquor," Billy smirks down at him. The sarcasm's a lot harder to muster than usual, as one long-fingered hand wraps around his calf and the other-- _Christ_ \--kneads the flesh above his knee. He lets the eyebrow rise a little higher and refuses to shift his weight to the other leg. His trousers are thick. From that angle, and drunk, it's unlikely that Orlando will notice anything. Unlikely. "Think you can walk?"

Orlando's eyes unfocus a little more as he thinks about this, and he starts to sway. Tightening his grip-- _rein it in, Boyd!_ \--on Billy's leg, he pulls himself a little farther upright, frowns, and confesses, "I'm not actually sure."

Billy nods once, reaches down to grasp Orlando's arms, and starts to haul him to his feet. He's stronger than he looks, but he's angled badly and Orlando weighs a lot more than anyone that gangly ought to. He fists Billy's vest and tries to tug himself upward; the motion presses his face into Billy's hip, so that when Billy finally wrestles him into place and starts pulling, he ends up dragging Orlando across the entire length of his body on the way up. Quickly, he transfers his grip to ribs and wrist and drapes Orlando's arm over his shoulders. It's a lot more stable. It also gives Billy a good excuse not to look him in the face until the flush ( _goddammit_ ) subsides.

The heavy breathing can be passed off as exertion.

"Outside, Lando," he says, and starts to head for the door. Orlando squawks in protests and digs his heels in, wheeling Billy around and nearly pulling them both over. He grunts and snaps Orlando against him, bracing him upright (as that's apparently what this is going to take) against his own body. His voice, thankfully, remains steady: "Is there a problem?"

Orlando goes a little pale at his tone--"steady" apparently leaves room for "violent;" he'll have to work on that--and stutters, "But ... there's a pot, and people, and ... it's _far_ , Bills!"

Billy snorts. "In your state, you'll piss on the floor. And I have to sleep here." He settles Orlando's weight a little more firmly against his hip and starts heading for the door. "Don't worry, 'Lando. We'll take the back stairs."

As they careen off the doorframe, Bill quietly reflects that the effort of wrestling six feet of intoxicated teenager down two flights of stairs ought to distract him from his own ... condition.

And from the conversation that they (thank God) didn't quite have.

There are a couple of times when Lando seriously doesn't think they are going to make it down the back stairs. First of all, they're steeper than the front stairs. Which is like the nature of back stairways anyhow, like, to be steeper and narrower and darker than front stairs.

Also, he's pretty sure they're moving -- the stairs, not them, because of course _they_ are moving, because otherwise how could they even get _down_ the stairs?

They do make it, though, because Bills is both stronger and steadier on his feet than Lando, which is always true, but is even truer right now, because apparently tequila steals things like balance, grace, strength, intelligence, and anything resembling sense.

Also, Bills is tense again, not like he was in the room right after Lando won his thirty-one cents, not laughing and relaxed and pleased, but all tight and hard and with his jaw set like he does when he's taking care of something he doesn't think is particularly pleasant, kind of jutting out slightly, and Lando hates the idea that _he's_ the something not particularly pleasant that Bills is taking care of right now, but he can't think how to ask if that's the case or not, and besides that, he really does have to piss, and he really does need help getting there.

The outhouse is behind the place, at least, and they don't see anyone.

Bills pushes him against the side while he wrestles the door open, and then just wraps one hand around Lando's bicep to steady him while he steps in.

"Smells like arse in here," Lando observes, and he abruptly hears the slur in his own voice, and wonders if he's sounded like that all night, and if so, how the hell is Billy even understanding him? "Arse," he says again, trying for more clarity, but without much success. "Arse," he repeats one more time, carefully, and grins, because it sounds about right that time.

Billy cocks that eyebrow at him again -- did he think earlier that he wished he could do that? well, he's changed his mind, that's _very_ annoying -- and Lando pokes it with his index finger to make it go back down.

"Don't poke your eyebrow up at me, Bills, thatsh... that's very annoying!"

"Didn't you have to piss?" Billy demands, but he isn't jutting his jaw anymore, and he actually looks a bit amused, and that's better.

"I did!" Lando agrees. "I mean, I do! But you have to shut the door, Bills, even if it smells like arse, because I don't want everyone in the whole bloody town looking at my arse!"

Billy looks at him pointedly for long, silent seconds, his eyes skipping from Lando's face down to Lando's foot, face, foot, face -- ugh, this is making him feel dizzy -- foot, face, foot, and then Lando realizes his foot is still outside the outhouse.

"Oh," he says. "Right." He directs his foot inside, and after a moment, it complies.

Billy shuts the door. Lando hears him snort softly.

"I heard that," he mutters, and fumbles at the buttons on his trousers. It takes him several tries to coerce them free, but he eventually manages it, and then he encounters a problem, because the only light in here is coming from the little crescent moon cut out of the door, and even that is only moonlight, and he can't bloody see what he's aiming at.

"Should have brought a lantern," he announces.

Outside, Billy says something that sounds a bit like, "I couldn't carry a lantern _and_ your drunk ass," but Lando could be wrong.

"I can't see to aim, Bills!" Lando complains. "Open the door a little. Just a little!"

The door creaks open slightly, giving Lando just enough light to make out the darker cut out hole in the wooden bench -- he's abruptly glad that pissing is the only thing he needs to do, because seriously, that thing looks like it could give a man a bloody painful splinter -- which should do well enough.

He sort of braces himself with one hand on the wall behind the bench, and there must be something about being drunk that makes pissing really really good, because the relief of the pressure in his midsection is so profound it's nearly pleasurable. He half groans with relief, and pisses for what surely must be about three years.

Then he tucks back in and fumbles one-handed at his fly, because he's still holding himself upright with the other. Eventually he decides that's not going to work, and has a go at it with both hands, and he's almost got one button into its (really remarkably small) hole when he loses his balance slightly and thumps backward into the outhouse door.

It gives immediately -- of course -- and before he really knows it, he's laying on his back in the dirt, looking up at the stars, which look oddly streaky and fluid.

The sound of a body hitting the inside of the door gives Billy just enough warning to jump sideways as Orlando flies out backwards and lands in a boneless sprawl. A cloud of dust bursts up around him, and Orando blinks once and says, to no one in particular, "Huh."

Billy clamps down hard on the rising laughter and comments, mildly, "Ought to be grateful you finished first." Without shifting his gaze, Orlando languidly raises one arm and makes an obscene gesture in Billy's general direction. He smirks, but a small voice in the back of his head whispers, _Someone could take that as an offer._ He does his best to ignore it. The arm lowers, and Billy waits for the next drunken remark, but it doesn't come. He's an unexpectedly thoughtful drunk, actually more reflective than he is sober, and it cuts through Billy's amusement at his incapacitation. The faint light picks out the edges of his features, not quite well enough for his expression to be readable. In silence, Billy watches Orlando's chest rise and fall and, for the first time, finds himself wondering what he's thinking about. His mother, maybe, or his stepfather, or some minor past incident that there's no way to guess at. In the darkness, the air still wreathed in the unspoken traces of the last half hour, there's a sudden gap in the space around them. Billy's been a poker player too long to feel a real need to fill it, but it's there nonetheless, and it twitches faintly at the creases of his skin.

After a couple of minutes pass without change, he steps out of the shadow of the outhouse and, extending one hand downward, murmurs, "This isn't the best place for a nap, Lando."

"I'm not," Lando whispers (because he doesn't want to speak too loudly, it might disturb the stars), and reaches up to fumble at Billy's hand. "I'm not sleeping, Bills. Look."

He wraps his fingers around Billy's hand, smaller and harder than Lando's, and tugs downward.

Billy resists for long moments, and Lando wonders blearily what he has against stars, but eventually Lando hears him sigh (he smiles faintly, it's familiar, oddly comfortable and comfort _ing_ ) and feels the resistance wane and fade as Billy comes down to one knee beside him in the dusty dooryard.

"What are you going on about, boy," he mutters, but there's no bite to it.

"Come down," Lando says. "Come down, Bills, look at the stars."

They are bloody amazing, pinpricks of ethereal light embedded in the black of the endless sky. They streak madly every time Lando blinks and leave swirls and streamers of color imprinted on his eyes.

"I'm not going to lay in the dirt with you, Lando," Billy says, but quietly, still without the kind of bite that Billy's words often hold, and even as he says it Lando can see him leaning back slightly from the corner of his eye, can see him tipping his face upward to look.

"The stars," Lando murmurs, and tugs on Billy's hand again. "So bloody gorgeous," he breathes.

The night sky is quiet, to Billy's eyes. Stars, a few faint hazes of cloud, a low-slivered moon. He's seen clearer nights, and more spectacular ones, when the orange globe of the moon loomed large and threatening on the horizon, when shooting stars blazed and burst their doomed glory across the sky. He doesn't see much extraordinary in the darkness above him. But when he tilts his head back down to watch the wonder flow across Lando's face, making his eyelids flicker wide, he gets hints of what he was supposed to see.

Lando's eyelids drop to half-mast and don't reopen, and Billy leans in, squeezing his hand slightly. "Time to head back up," he murmurs. "Stars'll still be here tomorrow." Lando blinks, eyes visibly shifting to focus on Billy's face. For a few moments, neither of them moves. A crash from inside punctuates the night, followed by a loud burst of laughter, and nodding, Lando lets go of Billy's hand and starts levering himself up. Deftly, Billy threads one arm around him, grasps a wrist, and lifts him carefully to his feet. Lando sways heavily into him and mumbles thanks when Billy shifts to steady him. Slowly, but with less difficulty than before, he navigates them both back through the door and up the stairs to their room, Lando trailing one hand along the rough walls as they pass by.

Reaching back with one hand, Billy shuts and locks the door behind them and guides the stumbling Lando across to drop gracefully onto the bed. Eyes mostly closed, he mumbles something and gropes toward his feet. Silently, Billy bends and pulls both boots off for him, setting them neatly by the foot of the bed, then brushes Lando's hands out of the way and begins to dispatch the buttons on the front of his shirt. The chest beneath them is brown and narrow, hairless as a child's, and Billy is suddenly filled with the memory of himself at fifteen, crushed and half-blind with fever, and his brother helping him in and out of clothes as chills came and went, changing bedpans, fetching water and damp cloths. Singing to him once, the quiet tune cutting through delirium like a cool breeze. Gently, Billy maneuvers Lando's arms out of the cotton shirt, unbuckles his belt and slides the jeans down his hips. Lando moans and twitches at the air against that much exposed skin, and Billy helps him wriggle the rest of the way onto the bed. As he pulls the covers up around Lando's shoulders and reaches to settle the pillow more securely under his head, Lando stretches one hand out blindly and presses it onto Billy's chest. "G'night, Bills," he breathes. His fingers curl around Billy's open collar, hold there, and then his arm drops slowly onto the bed.

Billy stares down at him, the smooth clear brow, the narrow bones of his head, the thin curve of too-long limbs beneath the blankets. Lando's shoulders hitch once as he yawns, then sink into the boneless rise and fall of the deeply unconscious. Quietly, Billy reaches under the bed and drags the pot out, moves toward the chest of drawers and retrieves the pitcher of water they filled earlier. Lando doesn't stir. Billy stands, looking at him, and then, nodding once, walks across the room. "Goodnight, kid," he murmurs, and he turns and pinches out the lamp.


	7. Bar Fight: Billy, Lando, New Mexico, 1873

  
Fastening the buttons of his fly as he walks, Billy shoves open the back door of the saloon and ducks inside, shutting the dust and outhouse stink and sweltering afternoon sun back outside where they belong. The doubleshots of whiskey are burning comfortably in his gullet, putting a nice haze between him and the week's worth of sweaty, exhausting labor on that asshole’s ranch. _Could’ve won the shit wages he paid us in three hands of cards_ , Billy thinks as he strides down the musty hallway, with half a grin to acknowledge the aggravation. _Hell, it would’ve been less work just to bust open his stupid, stingy little safe and ride off while he was still snoring._ At least it’s over, though, and with Lando around, he’s got the option of a couple drinks without having to worry that some shit-for-brains barfly is going to club him upside the head and ride off with his saddlebags. As long as he paces himself and stays sober enough to make it up the stairs under his own power, Billy figures he’s due for a bit of well-earned --

 _Thunk_. “You little shit!”

\-- relaxation.

Changing direction mid-stride, Billy flattens himself the wall and listens to the sounds coming from the larger room ahead of him. No reason, really, but this routine caution has more than once kept him free and breathing, and he’s not about to toss a habit that helpful. He hears the scrape of chair legs over the warped floorboards (two sets, maybe) and loud footsteps moving rapidly (not Lando’s, he’s sure of that, but too many patrons to guess who they might belong to) from near the windows to the bar where --

 _Crack!_ (fist on flesh)

\-- Lando had been.

 _Shit_ , he thinks, suddenly much farther from drunk but not as close to sober as he’d like, given the too-familiar grunt and stumbledragfumble of wrestling bodies and fists around cloth, and the way the rest of the patrons have gone quiet to watch the show. “Yes, you go get yourself a sidekick, Boyd,” he mutters, shoving his sleeves up and checking his holsters. “Brilliant idea --”

“You best think twice before you question a stranger’s manhood, boy,” someone growls in a backwater Texas accent. “He may just decide to prove it to you.”

Both guns in place and fully loaded, knife strapped inside his boot, “-- watch your back, no of _course_ he won’t be any trouble --”

“Sod off,” and that’s definitely Lando, accent tinting the defiance and that _splat_ sounds far too much like a mouth full of blood --

 _Thud._

“Lando, I swear I’m gonna beat you myself when they’re through with you,” Billy hisses, and then he’s stepping around the corner, bootheels clicking clear and challenging around the corner and one hand just resting against the butt of the right-hand gun. This gets a slow turn from the Texan (though he doesn’t shift his grip on Lando’s collar), some measuring gazes from the peanut gallery, and a glare from Lando, whose lip is bloody and purpling and who looks nothing so much as pissed off.

“Gentlemen,” an insultingly casual drawl, and now most everyone’s looking his way (except the bartender, who’s six feet from Lando and hasn’t so much as glanced up from the glass he’s wiping), “I’m going to have to ask you not to lay hands on my partner.”

Something that wants to be a groan lodges in Lando's chest at Billy's choice of words, even as it warms him through and through.

That's the problem, really. The start of everything.

It's not even that Lando gives a shite what they think of _him_ , per se. But he won't abide them snickering at Billy behind his back, especially not the stupid, sneering Texan. Not when Bills looks (or had looked, anyway, before this) relaxed for the first time in ages. Besides that, something about the bloke just rubs Lando the wrong way. There's something about him, something that seems to practically beg Lando's fist to connect with the Texan's face.

He seriously considers punching the bloke while he's busy looking at Billy, but reconsiders at the look on Billy's face.

 _Ah, shite,_ he thinks, and almost sighs. He's for it now, no matter whether they win or lose this fight. He can see it in Billy's eyes, the slow burn of aggravation, though his face shows nothing at all, is almost pleasantly neutral. It occurs to him to wonder if anyone else can see that in Billy's eyes, or if Lando only sees it because of months upon months of Billy looking at him like that. Obviously, he's more familiar with it than most would be.

"This ain't none of your concern, Boyd," the (really appallingly stupid) Texan drawls, and gives Lando a bit of a shake with his shirt still curled in Lando's collar, as though to emphasize that. "Me and him is just gonna talk about his smart mouth, and you'd do as well to stay out of it."

The Texan doesn't look around, but a couple of blokes behind him shift slightly, and Lando guesses there are going to be a few more than three in this fight, if it ever gears up to that. Billy doesn't look, but Lando doesn't doubt that he _sees_. Billy is awfully good at seeing without looking.

Lando grins with too many teeth, ignoring the sting of the split in his bottom lip, and says, "Personally, I rather think he just likes the bit where he throws me to the ground and straddles me whilst pretending to beat me up."

Billy’s seen his share of bar fights. Made them something of a hobby in his early days, before he’d learned to replace the hot rush of his anger with the cool steel of poker, the milder drug of sex. Now, the bluff and bluster generally doesn’t appeal—too much risk offered by inferior opponents, and there’s really no accomplishment in winning a brawl with a man who can’t even figure out how not to pick one. Lately, all that it usually takes is an unbroken minute of his stone man’s stare, that utter predatory boredom that raises the hackles, sets the ears back flat, and eventually sends the would-be challenger slinking off, limp little tail between his legs, muttering insults but as he’s been telling Lando for months now, no need to give a damn what they’re saying when they’re walking away.

It’s a good policy, a smart and efficient one that’s done just as much for his reputation as actual violence ever did, and it’s … no longer any kind of an option. Later, while pausing between rounds one and two of tanning Lando’s hide, he may deliver a brief lecture on the ways in which it is far superior to Lando’s current tactic, which somewhat resembles stripping naked, painting yourself crimson, and doing a naked war dance in the bull pen. Immediately after branding the bull.

The Texan’s bluntly ugly face goes slack, apparently trying to comprehend the grammar of “whilst,” and Billy doesn’t bother waiting for realization to dawn before he’s striding purposefully, but calmly, towards the bar. As he expected, realization is just slightly faster than he is, and the man turns with a roar and sinks a meaty fist into Lando’s gut, doubling him over before shoving him roughly to the ground. It’s not a bad uppercut, really, and should serve as a decent tip to Lando that taunting the stupid isn’t all that wise either (however accurate the stupid may prove your taunts to be), so Billy’s not too perturbed that he doesn’t reach the bar in time to stop it. However, before the man can start kicking, Billy walks smoothly up behind him and snaps a vicious sucker-punch into the Texan’s right kidney. The Texan reels and grabs at his back with a hoarse high groan, and Billy steps backwards, reaches left-handed for the nearest mug, and brains him with his own beer. (Being an honest man, he must admit that the actual violence never did much harm to his reputation either.) The man sails sideways in a beautiful arc, and as Billy, outwardly unphased, is mentally buffing his nails against his vest, Lando pulls himself painfully to his feet, picks up his own pint, and splashes the contents towards the unconscious Texan.

And all over the table of ranch hands directly behind him.

There’s no sound in the room except for eight chairs scrapping backwards as their dripping occupants rise to their feet. Lando’s eyes go wide, and Billy’s peripheral vision is just good enough for him to interpret the silent movement of Lando’s mouth as a reverent _oh bloody fucking hell._

“Nice move, _partner_ ,” Billy mutters, eyes locked on the men in front of them. “I hope that means you’re for real play.”

Lando doesn't see how he has much choice in the matter, and he doesn't especially appreciate Billy feeling the need to be an arse about it. He surveys the line of glowering (and dripping) men, and then risks cutting a glance at Billy, who is not glowering at all, who looks smooth and calm and cool. Some evil little slice of Lando's brain urges recklessly, and he opens his mouth and smirks, "You'll find out, I reckon," gratified to hear that he sounds like Billy looks, cool and unworried, ecstatic to see the tic of muscle jumping at the corner of Billy's eye, though it's the only outward sign that he even heard Lando.

It doesn't matter. Lando tilts his head sharply to one side, _crack_ , and then the other, fists his hands in a quick, sharp gesture, cracking all ten of his knuckles. The sound is very loud in the silence.

Lando grins, feeling himself gearing up, pulse going quick and erratic, palms sweaty, breath hissing between his bared teeth, and he's a little dismayed to find himself half-hard in his jeans, dismayed, yeah, but also amused. Why not? It's funny as hell.

"Well, come on then," he growls, and feels more than sees Billy's sudden and pointed attention on him. It makes him grin wider. "Come on, or sit your arses back down!"

 _Okay, let’s make that three rounds of ass-whipping for the greenhorn._ Billy feels the internal pull of facial muscles as his natural reaction to that little invitation (something between moderate surprise and intense exasperation) tries and fails to assert itself past his control. At this point, every man in the bar is on his feet and glowering in their general direction (with the possible exception of the barkeep, who has moved disinterestedly on to the next dusty glass). Out of the corner of his eye, Billy can see Lando grin a little more broadly, his eyebrows twitching upwards in derision, and feels the strong urge to hit the little bastard himself just to take him down a notch. There’s a long pause, as everyone waits for someone to make the opening move. Then: “Aw, shut your cock holster!” and a glass flies across the room and crashes into the bar between them. They both dodge the flying shards (as he moves, Billy just barely spots the kid who threw the glass ducking out of the front door) and the whole room bursts into action.

Directly in front of him, the largest of the dripping ranch hands bellows and flips the table over, knocking it onto three of his companions. Yelling and cursing, they throw themselves out of the way and stumble into the table nearest the front window; punches start flying as the drunken fathead makes single-mindedly toward a temporarily distracted Lando. Nobody’s moved for Billy himself yet (likely due to his earlier performance), so he waits until the man is directly up next to him before punching him rapidly in the left ear. His head snaps around as he spins and falls forward into the bar, slamming his temple on the rough wooden edge before collapsing into a heap on top of the still-unconscious Texan. Eyes wide and gleeful, Lando turns to Billy and starts to mouth something that looks like “Nice!” before someone reaches out from the seething knot of men just behind him, grabs his collar, and pulls Lando into the fray. Billy starts to move after him, but the remaining ranch hands pick that moment to quit gaping and charge.

“You’re on your own, kid,” Billy mutters, hooking a toe under the rung of the nearest stool and kicking it up into one hand. Smoothly, he transfers the momentum into a swift upward arc and slams it into the head of the first ranch hand. As he falls, his friend throws a wild punch towards Billy, who narrowly ducks it. The man’s hand smacks into the bar and he curses; shifting his grip so he’s got both hands fisted around the stool’s legs, Billy shoves the stool sharply upward and into his opponent’s bearded chin. Pivoting to his right, he jabs the stool behind him as the third man swings a powerful round-house. His arm lodges between the legs, and Billy breaks it with a sharp twist before bringing the stool sharply upward so that the seat slams against his forehead, snapping free of the legs entirely. The redhead sinks to the floor with a whimper, bits of wood clattering down around him; Billy flips the remaining wooden leg in one hand, testing its weight, and heads for the rest of the fight.

The biggest half-breed Sioux Lando has ever seen appears abruptly in front of Lando ( _Just my luck, I bet Bills got a little one,_ he has time to think), one hand resting on the butt of a big caliber revolver, the other on the haft of a tomahawk hanging from his belt. Lando doesn't wait for the huge son of a bitch to decide to pull one of them; he jabs with his left hand, and the bloke shifts easily in the other direction, which is just what Lando hoped. The half-breed's lips are still curling upward in the beginnings of a smile when Lando's right fist slams into his jaw, a smooth and easy uppercut, and the half-breed staggers back until he catches his ankles on an overturned chair and falls onto a table behind him, which creaks for an instant, and then gives way with a _crack_ that might be loud if it weren't competing with the sounds of the fight going on in the rest of the room. Lando beams, pleased; he's still smiling when something slams into his head just over his left ear and shatters, drenching his left shoulder with the strong smell of spirits.

He goes down, stunned, his head suddenly filled with a high-pitching drone that surely can't be good. He blinks, and for a moment can see nothing at all, just blackness occasionally spangled with bright flares of featureless light. He shoves backward with both heels, thinking to at least get out of the way of whoever just fucking sucker-punched him (with a fucking whiskey bottle, from the smell) until his back slams up against the wall, and his vision finally starts to clear up a little.

The blurry figure in front of Lando turns out to be the Texan, who's got his hands on both hips and is sneering triumphantly down at Lando. "Not so fucking smug now, are you, boy?" he drawls, and one hand drops to the butt of a pistol at his side. From the corner of his eye, Lando sees Billy laying about the place with a chunk of wood, maybe a chair leg or something, and he has time to be a little amazed that Billy's face is much as it ever looks, calm and calculating. It doesn't look like he's even breaking a sweat. Lando grins, and isn't even aware of it until the Texan snarls furiously, "What the hell are you grinning at, boy?"

Lando looks up, grin widening, and quips, "It's just that I've never seen a walking, talking prick before," and in the moment in which the Texan's eyes narrow and his hand flexes on the grip of his pistol, Lando kicks out at the bastard's left knee. He hears the brittle-sharp sound of snapping bone, and then the Texan shrieks and goes down hard, gun forgotten, as his leg bends in a direction it certainly was never meant to bend.

Lando struggles to his feet as several other blokes turn toward the sound of the screams, still feeling a little woozy, but at least upright now.

Billy turns toward him briefly -- probably, Lando thinks, just to make sure it isn't _him_ screaming -- and Lando gives him a little wave.

 _Ass,_ Billy thinks, but unfocused as it is, the grin’s contagious, and he permits himself a quirked eyebrow in return. This fight may be of Lando’s making, but he seemed to be holding his own – no panic, no wild and useless swings, and he’s used the pauses after the hits he’s taken (amazingly stupid, letting an opponent gather himself like that, but some men can’t resist a chance to tower over you and gloat) to his advantage. Billy’d experienced a brief moment of – something – when he saw the whiskey bottle shatter against Lando’s head, and it’d taken a bit more willpower than he would’ve liked to wait and see if Lando rolled with it. It’s been years since he’s fought after drinking, and though he’s steady enough right now, he doesn’t like the hot-and-cold of it, the distracting surges of emotion that keep pulling his focus to the part of the room Lando’s in.

 _Head back where it belongs, Boyd,_ he thinks to himself, and widens the field of his attention just in time to catch the brush of a boot behind him and duck, swinging his left arm up to block the blow before it comes crashing down on him. The impact (taller, whoever’s behind him, and fucking _strong_ ) knocks him off-balance and he stumbles forward, catching himself painfully on a table.

“Knife, Bills!” he hears Lando shout in the background (sounding frantic, which is never good in a brawl, and they’re going to have to work on stress and voice tones sometime later) and he whirls around without looking, right arm leading in a fast arc until the broken table leg connects with the brutal _crunch_ of ribs snapping. The blond man drops to the ground with a strangled howl, but not before Billy catches a glimpse of honed steel falling with a clatter from his hand. He kicks the man viciously in the side, just enough to ensure that he’ll stay down, and shakes his left hand with a wince. He’s jammed the wrist (it’s swelling already, but still usable) and gotten the wind knocked out of him against the table (he’d bet there’ll be a nice dark welt across his ribs tomorrow), but he’s otherwise intact. Catching Lando’s eyes in the crowd (wide and worried, and perhaps a touch unfocused still), Billy throws him a quick nod of thanks and reassurance before ducking toward the back wall to get his bearings and choose the quickest way to finish up this mess.

Lando's attention on Bills costs him; he doesn't doubt for a moment that Bills would say it's no more than he deserves. He jerks back even as he sees the bloke looming up in front of him, which makes it, of course, already too late. Lando doesn't recognize this one as being one of the original half-dozen he'd drenched with beer, but the whole bar is involved in the fight at this point, so that's no surprise. When he closes his big hands on Lando's vest (which seems rather stupid to Lando, as the bloke has several inches reach on him, and could easily hammer Lando into pudding with his meaty fists without Lando ever getting close) and lifts him clean off the ground -- his clear intent to pitch Lando over the bar and into the mirror and rows of bottles there, which will surely do some damage -- it takes Lando a second to realize that both his hands are free. Luckily, the bastard pauses to give Lando a grin, complete with very bad teeth and unjustified self-satisfaction, so Lando grins back and boxes his ears.

He drops Lando to clutch at his head, and Lando shoves his right fist into his vulnerable belly, throwing all his weight behind that shoulder. His opponent wheezes out a gasp and Lando draws back and slams his left fist square into his eye, which puts him down well enough, Lando's pleased to see.

Lando takes a step back -- his eyes automatically searching for Billy in the fray -- and sets himself back against the wall, the bar itself protecting his right side. He finds Billy easily enough, wading undaunted through the shifting press of flailing limbs and wielding a hunk of wood like a scythe, a briskly efficient back and forth motion that sends men to the ground before him.

There's still a faint ringing in Lando's ears, but it's barely audible past the din of the fight -- Lando's first genuine bar fight, and he's fairly pleased with it so far, though he suspects Billy would tell him that was the blow to the head talking -- but the next bloke who stumbles into swinging distance is singing what Lando's pretty sure is an Irish drinking song enthusiastically enough that Lando gets most of one verse loud and clear. He's holding a whiskey bottle, broken off at the neck, in one hand, and he's only as close as he is because a couple of long, tall cowboys are double-teaming him.

"Oi," Lando says, eying the broken bottle warily. "Did you break that on my head?"

"The bloke gives Lando a brief glance, steps quickly to one side and out of reach of a sloppy punch from one of the cowboys, and says, "Nae," the jumps up onto a handy bar stool to avoid a kick from the cowboy's partner. "I broke it over _his_ head," he adds, indicating the taller of the two cowboys, who Lando sees is sporting a bloody ear.

"Oh," Lando says, grinning. "Well that's all right, then."

"Cheers," the bloke agrees, and sits his arse on the bar, kicking the stool he'd been standing on into the legs of one cowboy, who stumbles, wind-milling madly, and then falls, managing to hook his hands into his partners belt and take him with. The bloke on the bar laughs and grabs a shot glass full of whiskey that seems momentarily ownerless, and throws it back, smacking his lips theatrically before slamming the glass back onto the bar, empty.

When the cowboy begins struggling to his feet, Lando gives him a pointed kick in the face to discourage him, and the bloke on the bar breaks into song.

Lando thinks it's likely not normal bar fight behavior, but for a while they jointly defend their little corner of the taproom against all comers, and Lando's convinced this one is all but over, there being more bodies on the floor than still up and swinging at this point.

He is wrong.

It’s hard to be sure, in the midst of what’s still a fairly deafening melee, but the crowd of combatants seems to be thinning, and Billy does his part to help it along. One would think, he reflects as he slams the splintering leg into one man’s head and arcs it back into another’s windpipe, that at the end of the brawl it’d be the best fighters left standing, but he learned years ago that this isn’t generally the case. Typically, it’s the brawny and overzealous fighting it out in twos and threes, while the defter and less stupid either systematically clear their section of the saloon (as Billy is now doing) or wait the storm out in a quiet patch of wall before moving in to finish the last few battered hotheads off. Normally, he prefers the second tactic, but as it was Lando who started this whole mess, most of those left swinging are going to be looking for the two of them anyway, so he might as well try to finish it.

With a good seven feet to either side of him clear of anyone standing, Billy is moving swiftly towards the center of the room when someone grabs the hem of his jeans and he goes down fast and hard, swollen wrist twisted and trapped beneath him. It’s the man whose windpipe he’d nearly crushed; he’s purple and wheezing, but the look in his eyes is murderous as he begins to drag Billy back towards him. When a sharp jerk doesn’t dislodge his grip, Billy rolls onto his side to bend his free leg and slam his boot heel into the bridge of the man’s nose. The man spasms and lets go with a choked-off gurgle, and Billy scoots hurriedly out of range. _Breathe through that, fucker,_ he thinks as he turns to survey the scene, and then someone in front of him staggers and falls and through the sudden gap Billy sees it.

About twenty feet in front of him is a massive half-breed, bloody-headed and swaying on his feet but grinning viciously. In one hand he’s holding a gleaming .45, hammer cocked.

The other hand is fisted in Lando’s hair.

And he may be swaying, but the barrel pressing into Lando’s temple isn’t moving a bit.

Billy’s blood pounds loud in his ears, too loud for him to make out whatever the man is hissing at Lando, but he doesn’t even pause. For the first time in the entire fight, Billy finds himself moving without thought or planning-- feet finding clear ground, injured left hand shoving his weight _back_ and _up_ , right casting the makeshift club aside as it flies toward his gunbelt.

An instant before he pulls the trigger, he hears the stool leg clatter to the ground.

 _"If you put a man down, you damn well make sure he's staying down."_

Lando can nearly hear the low, brusque curl of Billy's voice, can almost smell the campfire -- mostly mesquite, gathered in the west Texas brush, so uncommonly fragrant -- they'd been sitting at when Billy said it.

 _Bugger,_ he thinks, but he doesn't move. The singing Irishman is on the floor at Lando's feet, and he has time to think that he hopes he's not dead, but that's all the attention he can spare.

"How does it feel?" the half-breed hisses close to Lando's face, spraying Lando's cheek with spittle that's heavily laced with blood. "How does it feel, pretty boy with the smart Goddamn mouth. How does it feel to know you're going to die because you're too stupid to know when to walk away?"

Lando doesn't answer -- the half-breed clearly doesn't expect it, either, he's already straightening his arm and giving himself a little room, like maybe he doesn't want Lando's brains all over his shirt. Instead, he concentrates on his fingertips, which are barely touching the edge of the bar, struggling to recall exactly what is on the bar top; a bottle, a mug, something he can use... A shot glass. He clearly recalls the Irish bloke slamming it down on the bar after slugging the contents. He shifts as minutely as he can, and he feels his fingertips graze cool glass.

At nearly the same moment, he sees Billy.

He appears abruptly from behind another bloke, his gun already in his hand, and his face is a mask, utterly still.

He doesn't say anything; Lando doesn't think the half-breed is even aware of Billy at all.

The shot is very loud.

Hot liquid spatters Lando's face and he closes one eye reflexively, but only one. He has to be able to see. His hand curls around the shot glass and he jerks deliberately to one side, but he's barely moved when the second shot rings out. Lando jerks, startled, but not because he thinks he might've been hit.

He has time to think it's a little funny that it never even occurred to him that Billy might hit him, but then he sees a bloke behind Bills reach for his belt, and he forgets entirely about it.

"Bill!" he shouts, but he can see that Billy can't turn in time. _No,_ he thinks, but he's already moving.

It's happened every time Billy's ever killed someone, this shift in focus. It's subtle, not enough to actually endanger him, but there's a slight tunnelling of all his senses, a filtering of all information so that some pieces are muffled, dulled, while anything related to the weapons he holds and his intended targets are brought into sharp relief. He can still hear and see what's normally in range, and should something in the periphery become a threat, whatever internal mechanism controls this will immediately shunt that information into the fore, but there's a temporary distance between him and anything not about to die a bloody death at his hand.

Still, it's much stronger this time, the rest of the room muted as by a great noise. Very vaguely, he can see that everyone in his range of vision has frozen at the shots, so likely there's no other sound to be heard at all. But he can't deny that as soon as the second shot is fired (the first nearly severed the half-breed's hand; the second tunnels straight through his head), it's Lando his attention shifts to, and he doesn't even wait to watch the man fall.

So strong, in fact, that when Lando shouts his name and hurls the shot glass, what truly makes Billy turn isn't any sudden sign of a threat behind him (like the hiss of metal on leather, which he'll find etched in his memory of this moment later even though he knows he never heard it at the time) but the simple streak and whisper of the glass itself as it whizzes past him.

Whirling to follow its trajectory, he's just in time to see it slam and shatter against the cowboy's eye socket, dropping him and the pistol he was drawing to the ground.

For a brief second, he just looks blankly at the fallen man, curled and bleeding, and then turns slowly back to Lando. They stare at each other, the rest of the bar still paralyzed by the sudden escalation of violence. Later, he'll find his memory also includes all kinds of mental commentary on this series of actions (like _Bulls-eye at twenty paces_ and _Christ, Boyd, where did your head go_ and _You are never, ever drinking in public again_ ), but in the moment he's not aware of thinking anything until he hears himself say, "We really have to get you a gun."

And Lando's grin bursts into being, and Billy can't help but answer it in kind.


	8. Discoveries: Billy, Lando, Mexico City, 1873

They hit the bed in a tangle of limbs and half-shed clothing, lips and tongues seeking as they shift, yielding to the impact. With skill acquired during nearly a decade of sleeping with taller men, Billy rolls them both until he's on top, licking his way into the man's mouth as he reaches up to strip shirtsleeves from long brown arms. A chuckle breaks and bursts against his mouth, sweet with cigarettes and alcohol. "I don’t see," he murmurs against Billy's lips, so that he more tastes than hears the faint accent, "what the hurry is."

Without pulling away, Billy runs his hands appreciatively along well-muscled arms, guiding them to cross at the wrists. Swiftly, he pins him to the mattress with one hand, pushing the laughing face to one side and drawing his tongue down his neck. "I've been waiting for this," he growls, "for a long time." Billy's free hand finds warm, smooth skin and small, pebble-like nipples, scrapes rough nails across them and down his ribs. Tensing one thigh, he rolls his hips and then pulls his leg _up_ , earning a startled gasp. "Now,” he smirks, "if you’re got any suggestions ..."

The pulse beneath his teeth jumps. "No, I've no ..." -- Billy shifts his weight again -- "... oh god." He arches beneath Billy, wrenches his wrists free, and reaches up to yank open the buttons of Billy's shirt. The sudden pressure of a hot mouth on his collarbone turns Billy's laugh into a muffled groan; he rocks up onto his knees just long enough to jerk the shirt off and -- more carefully -- unbuckle his gun belt and set it on the bedside table, then he dives back down onto the bed. Their lips come together with bruising force, supple and demanding, hands running feverishly over all available skin. As Billy tangles his fingers in dark curls and breathes their scent in deep, a hand that certainly is not his own snakes between them and down the front of Billy's jeans. A dense wave of pleasure shudders over him. The door slams open.

His revolver's off the bedstand and aimed dead at the doorway before he can get his eyes to reopen. The intruders footsteps come to a sudden stop as he cocks it and waits patiently for the sensation to subside. "Can I help you?" he inquires.

"Um," Lando says, and maybe he should have knocked. Definitely should have knocked, actually, even though they are sharing this room, and one of those beds (the one that Billy isn't currently half naked on with someone else) belongs to Lando, and thus knocking hadn't seemed like a necessary precaution at the time. "Oh. Uh."

Billy carefully releases the hammer on the revolver, raising the muzzle toward the ceiling, and tension Lando hadn't been aware of feeling ebbs out of his spine and shoulders. For a moment, Billy just looks at him, frowning, brow furrowed, then he relaxes visibly, flips the revolver neatly in his palm, and slides it back into the holster draped across the little table beside the bed.

While he is doing this, Lando's eyes are irresistibly drawn to the other person in the bed. The man-type person in Billy's bed.

His mind wants to do some sort of stuttering, stammering ( _Man, that's a man, as in not a woman, but a person of the male persuasion, a person with male equipment in Billy's bed with Billy who is also a man..._ ) reevaluation of this highly unexpected turn of events, but no matter how many times he looks at Billy and then back at the person in the bed, it's still a bloke. He -- hey, isn't that that actor bloke, the one they'd seen on stage a couple of nights ago, the one Billy had bought a drink for later that night, and Billy had said, _"Nice show,"_ to him, and Lando had agreed, and the bloke had thanked them in his slippery-sounding French accent and given Bills a little nod that Lando had noticed but hadn't thought anything of at the time -- sees Lando looking at him, and gives him a brief, sharp smile (his lips are dark, bruised looking, Lando sees, and he has glittery, knowing eyes), and Lando flushes hot and all at once. " _Oh!_ " Lando says, and then has to force his mouth to close afterward, as it seems his jaw has become unhinged and doesn't want to work properly.

Lando sees that the actor's trousers are unbuttoned.

 _Oh_ , he thinks again, and now he feels really, really stupid, and he doesn't want to look at Billy ( _at all_ ), but he feels like he sort of has to, so he does. "Sorry, Bills," he manages a little hoarsely, and puts more effort into keeping his face serene than he ever has at any poker game. He can't hide the flush, it's true, but he intends to keep the actual extent of his surprise to himself, if he can.

Billy accepts and dismisses the apology with a brief shrug, pulled between the distracting warmth of the man below him and a nagging need to assess Lando's reaction. He hasn't much discussed his ... activities; there's little of his life he likes putting up for observation, this no more nor less than anything else. After watching Lando watch the girls in a saloon in New Mexico, Billy'd pulled him aside and explained how to avoid the grimmer cathouses, choose the cleaner whores. It's their sole conversation about sex to date, and if Lando's had occasion to use Billy's advice, he's been unusually secretive about it. Still, if this is something that's going to cause problems later, Billy'd like to know about it now.

But Lando doesn't look upset or repulsed, just astonished. (Embarrassed, too; his poker face may be improving by the day, but he hasn't yet succeeded in getting that flush under control. Billy makes a mental note to work on it with him later.) His eyes are darting back and forth from Billy to his companion, from their faces to their hands to their intertwined legs and back again, almost as if _they'd_ ambushed _him_ and he's still too stunned to contemplate escape.

A sudden, restless movement beneath him knocks Billy out of his thoughts and back into his body, which is demanding rather compellingly that he get on with the show. He cocks his head to the side, one brow quirked in a silent question, and Lando blinks, startled. Their eyes lock for a moment; Lando stammers, "Er. I, um ... that is--uh."

The bloke groans and pulls the sheet over his head. Billy's right eyebrow rises to join the left.

Lando grins sheepishly and jerks his shoulders as though shaking off a chill. "I'll see you tomorrow, Bills," he says, and when Billy smirks at him in response, he ducks out into the hallway and shuts the door behind him.

 _Well, that was ... odd._

There's a rustle as the man pushes the sheet away. "'Bills,' is it?" he asks, sounding amused.

On his lips, the nickname sounds like "Beelz." Billy twitches and says, "To him." _My partner_ , he almost adds, but represses the urge to explain.

The man smiles wryly at his reply but doesn't comment. "William, then," he accedes. "William, I am Jean."

Billy bows his head, mock courtly, while Jean laughs, then slides his hands appreciatively back down the slim, strong torso. "Now, Jean," he murmurs, shifting his hips, "since I don't expect there'll be more interruptions..."

Jean's response is enthusiastic enough to silence the small, distractible voice in Billy's head that's wondering where Lando will sleep tonight.

Lando begins to doubt the wisdom of leaning against the door to recover his equilibrium right around the time he hears someone inside the room (and he doesn't want to know which of them, really, he doesn't) growl something consonant heavy and visceral followed directly by the emphatic wham of wood on wood. His right hand, slick with sweat and alarmingly unsteady, goes automatically up to shove his hair (longish, now, curling down and over his collar in a way that his mum never would have allowed and his step-father would have sneered at) off his forehead.

He rubs both palms on his trousers to dry them, and then uses both hands to shove himself away from the door. He takes several steps, stopping finally at the top of the stairs, thinking that equilibrium might be a bit easier to come by without the (distracting) sounds coming from inside Billy's ( _his_ )( _their_ ) room.

 _Well then_ , he thinks, and nods, and hooks his thumbs into his belt. _Well_.

"So, Bills likes blokes," he murmurs, only marginally aware that he is actually saying the words out loud, his voice gone low and thick with the accent that he's been working hard on banishing (it's one of his own tells, that accent, he's fully aware of it, though oddly enough, it's not one of those that Billy has remarked upon -- not yet anyway) from his daily speech. Saying it seems to help.

The chaotic rush of blood heating his face and throbbing in his temples recedes, and his mind slows and begins to work more or less properly again. As it does, several things become clear as things tend to do on occasion, and Lando feels… well, like Billy often makes him feel.

Young and unforgivably stupid.

"You utter git," he accuses in a whisper, annoyed with himself.

He's been with Bills for a while now -- nine months, give or take -- and he can't believe how blind he is.

Nine months of never walking in on Billy with a whore or a saloon girl, of never seeing him do anything except behave with cordial charm -- Billy has a great deal of charm when he wants to, which is a source of amusement, considering his standard total lack of said charm -- toward the women that made advances. And there had been a few. More than a few.

"Idiot," Lando mutters, shaking his head. It isn't as though it's unheard of. There had been men like that on the ranch (although Lando knew this only from talk, overhead bits and pieces of disjointed conversation captured by the curious ears of an overactive boy, none of the hands would have ever actually have spoken of such things to the Rancher's "son"). Nine months, and it simply hadn't ever occurred to him that it was unusual for a bloke like Bills not to be "entertaining" on occasion.

Not that Lando had been "entertaining," either. But he hadn't wanted to fumble through the first time with Billy in the same room, hadn't wanted to look forward to the amusement he'd have seen the next morning, lurking in Billy's normally guarded eyes. He just… he had assumed…

He doesn't even know what he had assumed.

 _Why…?_ he thinks, and then loses the rest of the question when he looks up and realizes that he standing in front of Bills' ( _their_ ) room again. Inside, he hears a muffled thump, and then a fervent string of jumbled profanities -- unmistakably Billy's voice, though it's gone all rough and hoarse -- filthy enough that he feels the flush heating his face again, feels his brows arching upward in surprise (though as far as cussing goes, he's got rather good at it himself, of late) and admiration.

So.

He deliberately moves himself back to the head of the stairs and curls a hand around the banister, as though to anchor himself. He has no business listening to that. Why would he even want to?

He shakes his head. _Why…?_ he thinks again, but whatever the question is, it refuses to solidify in his mind.

So.

He needs a place to sleep tonight, then.

He's not keen on the idea of taking another room, either, not when the one Bills is currently, uh, using, had been so dear to begin with. Lando has the money for it, but since leaving home, the idea of being flat broke makes him uncomfortable. You never know when something is going to happen, and you'll need it for something.

As present circumstances illustrate quite effectively.

So.

One of the saloon girls, petite and pretty, and a gentleman in a suit start up the stairs arm in arm. She is giggling and flushed. His hands are wandering in a decidedly familiar fashion. Lando steps aside when they near the top, nodding politely to the bloke, tipping an imaginary hat to the lady. The man nods back.

The girl smiles and inclines her head briefly.

They pass him, moving further down the hall, and Lando glances over his shoulder at the door to Billy's room. When he looks away, the girl is looking over her shoulder at him, still smiling. She winks, and her pink tongue darts out, moistening red lips.

"So," he says, once the door has closed behind the pair of them, and he's alone in the upstairs hall again, pondering his options. He brushes his hair back from his forehead.

So.

No reason not to take advantage of a night to himself, is there? No reason at all.

He goes downstairs.


	9. The Shooting Lesson: Billy, Lando, the Colorado Territory, 1873

Billy wakes up to the sun on his face and the smell of coffee.

It's early yet, to judge from the snap in the air, but a touch later than is his custom, and he blinks against the brightness as he works his way out of his sleeping roll. Campsite looks unmolested, with the horses grazing placidly off to one side. Lando's not in sight, but Billy can hear him on the other side of the rise, and there's a pot of oatmeal and a kettle of coffee warming next to the fire. He straps his gunbelts into place, flipping each revolver open to check the chambers (fully loaded, as he left them) before settling them in the holsters. Hat and boots come next, after a quick check proves them free of invaders, and he retrieves his coat from where it was pressed into service as a pillow. His roll comes together easily enough, and he straps it down tight and tosses it over next to his pack. Morning ritual at its end, he climbs to his feet and stretches, one hand braced against his head to a cascade of pops down his spine.

The coffee is Lando's usual rivermud, but he's done a fair job on the oatmeal, and Billy works his way through both at an easy pace before heading down to the water to wash the dishes and his face. This spot is a favorite of his: a decent-sized clearing on the south side of the Purgatoire, where the big rocks catch the sun all day and the cottonwood trees hide the camp from the road. He found it by accident on his first trip to Denver, and in the years since there's been no sign that anybody uses it but him. He usually makes at least a day's stop, if he can afford to; the fish will bite a line left tied and drifting, and one of the eddies makes for fine bathing after a few hours of sun. For now, though, he contents himself with scrubbing a cupped-handful of chilly water over his face and neck and taking a few minutes to appreciate the view before he heads off to find Lando.

He's in the first place Billy checks, an open stretch of rocky ground not a hundred yards over from their campsite. There's a heap of small boulders at one end, and Lando's circling around them with his arms full of a truly bizarre assortment of objects: smaller rocks, a couple branches, a bird's nest, what could be a badger skull, and something that looks like an old boot the river tossed up. With great deliberation, he places a rock down on a boulder, squints up at the far end of the clearing, adjusts it, circles the whole formation, squints again, and selects the next object. Billy smothers a grin and leans up on the far side of a cottonwood to watch him work. It takes a while, Lando fussing with each piece of detritus and muttering to himself or humming snatches of melody. After he's got the last piece settled (the badger skull, balanced precariously on one end of a branch wedged upright) and has stepped back to admire his handiwork, Billy pushes off his tree and saunters out into the sunlight.

"You taken up a hobby I should know about, Lando?" he calls. Lando turns and grins broadly; he's not usually this chipper in the mornings (Billy's gotten used to having to yank the bedroll out from under him to get him moving), but today he's practically beaming with good humor.

"Look, Bills!" he hollers, gesturing back at his pile of boulders. Mentally calculating how much coffee had been drunk when he'd woken, Billy raises an eyebrow. Lando glares a little and steps to one side, throwing both arms out to frame the sculpture with a flourish. "It's a shooting range!"

Billy's one eyebrow -- the eyebrow of skepticism, Lando thinks of it privately -- arches further upward, but on the usual scale of these things it's not too doubtful (which is to say it's only about an inch higher than his other eyebrow, rather than winging up like it's trying to retreat into his hairline), so Lando chooses to take it as a good sign. He grins, and Billy's eyebrow lowers very slightly. "I'll need to practice, Bills; you _said_ I'd need to practice," he reminds Billy, and watches the eyebrow lower itself so that it's even with its partner again.

"I did say that," Billy says, which would be agreement coming from anyone else, but which Lando has figured out by now is merely a statement of fact when Billy says it.

Lando's hand drops to the butt of the revolver hanging low on his right side; the weight of it is still new enough to be distracting and unfamiliar, but he feels that little spark of excitement at the feel of the smooth bone under his fingertips. It isn't new, of course; guns are expensive, and though he and Bills are holding plenty comfortably, they're nowhere near comfortable enough to just buy a new revolver on a whim. And besides that, Bills had said it was a good idea to find out if Lando had a feel for a pistol before they sprang for something fancy.

So it's not new -- and there's just the one, no reason for two until Lando proves capable, also according to Billy, no matter how desperately Lando wants to wear the double gunbelts -- but it is nice, a good gun. Billy had spent quite some time looking over what had been available, had hefted them, spun the cylinders on a few, and eventually, had broken this one and another down to be sure everything was clean and in good order before telling Lando to take his pick of them. Every time Lando touches it, he still feels the echo of his delight.

Mixed with the delight is a healthy dose of nerves, however. He's got no real idea how well he'll do with a gun. It's not like poker, he figures, because a lot of learning poker for Lando has been a process of slow absorption. There are the rules, yeah, and Billy has made sure he knows them backwards and forwards, but much of what he understands about the game he's learned from watching Billy play it. He thinks this will be different, and not just because he hasn't had much chance to watch Billy use his guns. This is going to take a hell of a lot more practice before he's good at it, he thinks; it's unlikely that the knack that he has for poker is going to apply.

None of that stops him from being wildly excited, however, and he shifts anxiously from foot to foot, watching Billy as he considers each of the objects Lando has scattered about the scrubby expanse of earth nearby. He's made no attempt to make it easy for himself -- has done just the opposite, in fact, as it seems to him that being good at something when the doing of it is made easy is no real skill at all -- and he wants to ask Billy if he approves, but can't quite bring himself to do it. There've been times, of late, that he can _feel_ Billy's impatience with Lando's lack of self-confidence, and Lando doesn't want to rile Billy right now.

Not when he's angling for a lesson.

So he stands quiet and still is he can -- which is not entirely -- and waits for Billy to finish considering. Billy frowns and turns slightly to scan the area nearest the road, then cocks his head to squint up at the angle of the sun, one eye mostly closed. He turns his head and spits on the ground and rolls his shoulders as though to settle himself. "I reckon now's as good a time as any," he says, and Lando grins and resists the urge to whoop triumphantly.

Lando's got that look right now that reminds Billy of a half-grown herder dog waiting for the practice call, like he could be off and running before a word'd make it fully out of Billy's mouth. Lately, he's been seeing Lando shed youth (and its attendant stupidity) with unconscious but rapid ease, baring the frame of his permanent character. And he's steadying remarkably--just a few months ago he would've been bouncing on his heels, literally, with no notion until Billy called him on it. Now he's standing there, hand casual on the butt of his gun, and only the slight drumming of his index finger on the gripstock gives him away. Billy watches it out of his periphery, and holds off a smile, and thinks that this keen excitement will always be a part of Lando. One day he'll be able to sit at a High Stakes table and hold a royal flush like it's the supper menu, no mistake about it, but in the back of his mind where no one can see it, his bootheels will be bouncing.

Now, though, that abundance of energy is a liability for the lesson at hand, so Billy tilts his head and says, "Go fetch my kit -- make sure to get the oil with it -- and a box of bullets. Bring the .44s too." Lando waits an extra beat, to make sure Billy's finished (age and experience have also conspired to make him a better pupil), and then his smile cracks wide open and he takes off for their campsite at a dead sprint. Billy wanders over to a large flat-topped rock, settles himself next to it, and starts considering how best to go about this.

When Lando comes back into the clearing, it's at a brisk but more sedate walk (and good thing, too, because Billy would've blistered his ears for running with his gun kit and two boxes of ammunition), and the exertion seems to have grounded him slightly. Billy takes the bullets first, setting them off to the side, and then spreads his kit out on the rock in front of him. He holds one hand out while the other continues to sort his tools; it takes Lando a second, but he cottons on just before Billy has to cut his eyes up in a prompt. He lays his gun carefully in Billy's hand (it's warm to the touch) and drops into a crouch beside him.

"I'll teach you this later," Billy says, flipping the catch and tipping the barrel up to double-check the chambers. "For now, just watch." Lando nods and leans in, eyes keen, as Billy begins to disassemble the revolver. It's an S&W Model Two Army, same as Billy's had been before he'd managed to lay hands on a pair of Model Three's. He intends to boost Lando to the same, provided Lando shows a knack for this, but in the meantime he doesn't feature ending up in situations that'll rest on Lando's ability to reload in seconds, so the Model Two'll do for now. It's a good gun besides, if a little fragile at the top hinge, and Billy's still got the proper tools for it. So far, it looks to be well cared-for; the components are yielding easy enough under punch and screwdriver and plier, and he's not finding anything worse than a bit of grime and caked-on grease.

Having broken the gun down to his satisfaction, he unstoppers the gun oil and dips the first of the brushes in it. "You need to clean it nightly," he says, scrubbing out each of the chambers, "cylinder, barrel, and frame at least if you can't get a clean spot to take it apart. If there's been rain or dust, especially both, always do the full job. Same if you've had occasion to fire it; trouble comes in decks." There's a stubborn little stain above the trigger; he works it over with the chamois. "If you scrimp on the maintenance, you won't notice much at first, but the pins'll come to stick and the screws'll give over time, and you're liable to learn of it staring down the barrel of another man's gun." Cadence follows action as he polishing the pins down and checking each of the screws for wear or stripping. A couple of the springs want replacing, but they're sound enough to learn on, and they can stock up on spare parts in Denver.

There's not much more to say, as he's saving the hows of the maintenance for later, so he goes silent to concentrate on what he's doing. As always, Billy finds the methodical nature of the work soothing, cleaning and examining each bit of metal, laying them all on the cloth with deliberate care. When all the pieces are gleaming, he seals the oil and starts the reassembly process. It's both easier and more difficult than taking the gun apart; there's nothing there now to gum up the works, but even a slight mis-set will cause problems later. Billy takes his time, lining the starter-punch up precisely, double-checking the angle before each tap of the hammer. He's aware of Lando's eyes tracking his movements, Lando's fingers twitching in mimicry as he commits it to memory. It's an enviable knack, the way his body soaks up what his eyes witness, and Billy's got no doubt that he'll find Lando's half-learned this when he goes to teach it to him.

The hinge-screw twists into place, and Billy spins the cylinder, checks the action on hammer and trigger. Thumbing the barrel catch, he gives the gun a firm shake to test for rattle. Everything's as it should be. He wraps his tools back up and hands the kit to Lando to tie off while he reaches for the box of .32s. Each cartridge slots neatly into its chamber. When Billy stands Lando does too, right hand drifting out, but he drops it to his side when Billy makes no motion to hand the gun over.

Billy cocks his head back a little, to get a better look at Lando's face. "Tell me what you know about shooting," he says.

"Um," Lando says, but he's aware enough of himself now to know that no matter how dismayed he might be feeling currently (that would be very), it's not showing on his face. Billy's expression remains neutral in the face of Lando's uncertainty, however, so Lando figures it's okay. It's an honest question, not an excuse to mock. Billy _does_ mock, but it's fairly gentle, a form of ribbing Lando had witnessed growing up (between brothers, sometimes, or hands on the ranch). Lando's never actually been a party to that kind of thing before Bills, though, and even now he's not used to it.

He shrugs and backs up a couple of feet so Billy won't have to crane his neck to look at Lando. "Not much," Lando admits. "Not much more than you point the end with the hole in it at what you want to shoot." He hooks his thumbs into the stiff, new leather of his gunbelt and forces himself not to rock or bounce. "I haven't ever even shot a rifle or a shotgun. My step-father kept them under lock and key." Billy nods his understanding of this, but doesn't say anything, which Lando takes to mean he's to keep talking.

He considers for another minute, then gives into the urge to rock a little on the balls of his feet. "Well, then," he says. "I know you have to cock the hammer back to fire. I've heard that you have to aim with both eyes to get the right perspective, even though a lot of people don't, but I don't know that that's true. I think it must be, though, since it's true enough with a slingshot." He thinks again, casting one eye toward the gun Billy's still holding, and adds, "I know a gun that size will kick like hell."

He takes another minute to think -- it seems fairly ridiculous that that's all he can come up with, but that seems to be the case -- and then sighs. "I guess that's it, practically speaking," he admits.

Billy nods. It's about the answer he expected, and one that told him what he wanted to know. "Good. You won't have to take time to unlearn bad habits." He hands the gun to Lando and walks to the center of the clearing, stopping about forty paces' distance from the makeshift range. Lando follows.

It's a good set-up, really; nice variety of targets, different sizes, different heights, and not all of them positioned for a clear shot. Billy takes a moment to admire it, then looks over and lets the quiet spin out while he waits for Lando to start them off. Despite what Lando may think (and what he's said on occasion), Billy's hardly a born teacher. In the last year and a half, he's taken to it far more than he imagined he would, but his method is still more instinct than structure. He knows what he wants to teach Lando about shooting, what Lando'll need to know, but there's more than one road into the lesson and Billy's far from settled on which one'd be best. So he opts to pass on the question and just wait and see what Lando does. It's not the kindest way to start, maybe, but he's never claimed to be gentle, and this does tend to get them where they're going as sure as any set course would.

A minute crawls slowly by before Lando shifts and tips the gun in his hand, letting the sun catching on the metal. "I don't know how you want me to hold it. For shooting, I mean." He bears Billy's considering look a little uncomfortably but without comment.

Picking up a fist-sized rock, Billy tests its weight and then lobs it in a long arc over the open ground. Turning to follow the throw, Lando doesn't flinch when the rock explodes in midair, but he jumps when another shot shatters the largest of the fragments barely an instant after it's been flung loose. By the time he whirls back, eyes dinner-plate wide, Billy's already got his left-hand pistol holstered; he flips the right-hand gun back into the leather, metal still hot from the second shot. He lets his hands rest easy on the grips and meets Lando's eyes.

"It depends," he tells him.

Lando blinks, following the thread of conversation back, and a little of the admiration and envy fade from his expression as he considers this. "On what I'm shooting?" he asks.

Billy tilts his head sideways, less disagreement than redirection, and says, "On the circumstances where you decide to shoot." He looks down at the gun hanging loose in Lando's hand, over at the broken fragments of rock littering the ground beyond them, and then back up at Lando. "When could you shoot a man, Lando?"

Lando's face clouds over at the question. Billy thinks that most shooting lessons probably start with how to hit the target (he wouldn't know, he taught himself), but he suspects it won't be Lando's physical ability that sets limits on his gunwork, and he wants them both looking to those other limits now. Voice even and quiet, Billy asks, "When could you kill him?"

He doesn't want to admit that the question shakes him a little -- bloody hell, the whole reason this is happening at all is because of the barfight, because of what _almost_ happened that day -- but it does, and he guesses Billy knows it. As well as Billy knows Lando, it's practically a certainty. He feels foolish, he feels young, and he hates that feeling, as always. Of course Billy wants to know the answer to that question. Of course he does. As excited as Lando had been about getting a pistol of his own -- as excited as he _still_ is, in spite of understanding the angles of it -- he hadn't once thought about the most basic reason a man needs one.

A rifle or a shotgun might be for hunting, might be for self-defense, but there's no reason for the Model Threes hanging low on Billy's hips -- or the Model Two Lando is holding in his now-sweaty right hand -- except for killing people.

He ought to consider the question, ought to give it the attention he knows it deserves, but the simple truth is, he doesn't want to. The idea makes him feel sick and unhappy, fills him with more than a little dread. He remembers the smell of the gunpowder hanging in the air, a smell he usually quite likes, and the way it had been mixed with the sweet tang of cooked blood. He remembers the warm spray of it across his own face. He remembers the mess and the cold, cold look in Billy's eyes, and his mind shies away from the notion that he could ever look like that himself.

He doesn't know how to say those things. And he isn't sure he would, even if he did know how. He loves Bills and wouldn't hurt him for anything, and though Billy isn't the kind of bloke that's easily hurt, Lando thinks knowing that Lando doesn't want to be like him, not like that (that the way Billy looks when he's behind the double-dose of death of his guns in both hands is the only time Lando doesn't admire him), might be enough to do it.

But he has to say something; he knows Billy, and unless he finds something to say there will be no lesson. And in spite of everything that goes along with the gun in his hand, Lando wants to learn this. Even more, perhaps, than he'd wanted to learn poker, he wants to know this. It's not just the thing in the bar, either. Someday may come the time when there's a bloke behind Billy and there isn't a shot glass at hand, there may come a time when Lando needs to reciprocate that act, and he must be able to do that.

As sick and awful as the idea of killing a man makes him, the idea of losing Bills because Lando doesn't know how to save him makes him feel a thousand times worse.

"When I have to," he says finally, and is a little surprised to hear his own voice come out low and grim and grating, but certain.

Watching the thoughts circle back and forth behind Lando's face sets Billy on alert, because it's clear that they're not pleasant but he can't tell much more than that. And he doesn't think it's because Lando's trying to hide them (he can't quite manage that yet when there aren't cards involved, though he is getting more opaque, more careful), but because they're on new territory now, and Billy doesn't have all the cues he needs to recognize what he's seeing. The hard edge in Lando's voice speaks clear enough -- he doesn't doubt his answer, and Billy doesn't either, not exactly. But necessity's a nebulous thing, with boundaries that shift without warning, and he means to walk them along the edges a bit so Lando knows it too. More than that, though, it's the look in Lando's eyes that makes him wary, because his face is tight but his eyes look wild -- cornered.

"And when's that?" Billy asks, and Lando turns his head a little farther, as though he wants to make sure his glare doesn't miss its mark. He looks about as pissed off as Billy's ever seen him, and that ratchets Billy's attention a notch tighter. Voice dispassionate, he keeps fishing. "When he's drawing down on you?"

"Yes." Lando fills the sound with a world of aggravation.

"If he's pulling a knife?"

"Yes." Same answer, same tone.

Billy takes them the next step forward. "What if it's a chair, or a whip -- something that'll hurt like hell, but won't kill you?"

This time, Lando hesitates a little. "It depends. I don't know. Maybe." His free hand is beating a tattoo onto his left thigh; he doesn't seem to notice.

There's a rhythm to this, not unlike tracking, and for all that it's Lando's limits Billy's trying to find, each question feels like he's circling in on Lando himself. Lando feels it too, obviously; the tension in his shoulders is visible out of Billy's periphery, and the hand holding the revolver has wrapped around it, thumb on the gripstock, fingers curving down tight around the outside of the trigger guard. It's a queer way to hold it -- awkward, and a little hateful, as though he's prepared to cast it away. Instinctively, Billy shifts so that his weight's balanced better over his feet. He doesn't feel threatened (he can't imagine Lando ever raising a hand to him, or vice versa), but it's clear they're coming up on something from the way Lando's braced for it, and he wants to be ready when they get there. "Depends on what?"

Lando frowns. "On the situation. On whether or not I think he means to kill me. On whether or not I think I can talk my way out of it, or fight my way out of it without getting too messed up. On lots of things. Is there some point to this, Bill?"

On any other day, that last snippy question would mean the end of the lesson, and they both know it. In one of their early poker lessons, back when Billy was still struggling to put words to things he'd never intended to talk about, Lando had complained that Billy wasn't _telling_ him anything, that he just sat there and beat him. Billy'd stopped, and stared at him, and finally said, _Kid, I'm not gonna teach someone who doesn't want to be taught_. He hadn't brought the cards out again for two weeks. But this isn't a poker lesson, and it's not impatience that's putting the fight in Lando now. Billy ignores the question, not to be difficult, or because he doesn't know the answer, but because telling him outright what they're trying to get to would give Lando the means to avoid it entirely. And the more Lando fights this, the more Billy's sure they can't afford not to get into it now.

Lando waits, mentally getting a grip on his temper, just waiting for Billy to say something sharp, or just turn and walk off. _It's a lesson, just a lesson,_ he tells himself -- and he knows that this isn't all that different than the way Billy usually goes about teaching Lando things, it only _feels_ different -- but it doesn't dispel the sense of being ... pushed, somehow. Cornered. He waits, certain that Bills will call it off, and only half-regretful of that.

But Billy doesn't do it. Instead, he ignores the question entirely, and carries on as though Lando hadn't said a word, as though there hadn't even been a good two or three minute silence in there. "Could you kill on a job?" he asks, voice inflectionless, and something hard and heavy settles in the pit of Lando's belly, something that feels suspiciously like dread. "To protect a boss, his trade or his goods?"

Lando looks away, squints up at the sky for a long moment, and tries to put whatever it is aside. He feels it, whatever it is, feels it like a threat hovering at the edges of his perception, hummingbird-quick, too quick to really track with your eyes. Like a bullet, like the moment when everything empties out of Billy's eyes, like the movement of his hands as he draws ...

He shakes his head a little, not a negative, just a motion, movement to try and let off some of the tension he can feel coiling under his skin. He shifts his gaze out to the shooting gallery, picks out the badger skull with his eyes, stares fiercely at it while he tries to get ahold of himself.

"Lando," Billy says, and it's a prompt, but it's an unusually gentle one. Any other time, Lando would probably appreciate that, would value it (because while Bills is a lot of good things, patient is not one of them), and even now he knows that he must've gone quiet for a while, a minute at least, for Billy to actually say something, but he can't ignore the sharp uprising of aggravation that flares in his chest and tightens his shoulders.

"I don't know, dammit," he snaps, tongue just a hair faster than his self-control, and that will be the end of this for sure. Lando runs his free hand through his hair -- it's so long now that his fingers tangle briefly in the curls and he has to tug them free, which only aggravates him more -- and sighs. "I don't bloody know," he repeats, more harshly than he means to, but less snappish than before, at least.

The weight of Billy's gaze is enormous. Lando can sort of see it out of the corner of his eye, though he doesn't turn to look. He doesn't want to see that cool, distant look Bills gets on those few occasions on which Lando manages to actually offend him, rather than just aggravating him.

"Lando," Billy repeats eventually, and his tone is still quiet and calm. "We're trying to answer your question."

 _Huh?_ he thinks, but doesn't say, some shade of his mother reminding him silently that "Huh" is not a word, but that's almost periphery to what he's actually thinking. He's actually thinking that he doesn't belive Billy has ever spoken to him with quite this degree of patience, with such deliberate intent not to rile Lando, and he can't help but respond to that by doing his damnedest to comply. He shakes his head again and forces himself to think about what Billy's saying. "What question?" he asks, because he honestly doesn't remember what he'd even asked, and he asks it calmly, if perhaps not exactly nicely.

"You asked how you're supposed to hold a gun while you're shooting," Billy says, still with that same steady patience. He's just looking at Lando, his expression serene but _focused_. He's never looked at Lando like that as far as Lando can recall, and it unsettles him. The weight in his belly turns over oddly, almost fluttering, and Lando is so uncertain of what that look means, and of what his own reaction to it means, that he blinks and looks away.

It takes him a moment to come back to the thread of the conversation, and it occurs to him that this is by far the hardest beginning to anything Billy has tried to teach him yet, and that hardly bodes well. He shrugs the thought away with difficulty, and takes a deep breath. "I'm not following you, Billy," he admits with deliberate calm, though he doesn't look at Billy again.

Lando's grimace is frustrated and weary, the same face he wears toward the end of a messy day of field labor. Billy can sympathize -- they've spiralled pretty far from the nominal topic, and he hasn't given Lando much of a map to follow. He's not ready to, not quite yet, but he cuts back to beginning in hopes that something concrete will make the going a little easier for Lando. "Well, for one thing, it matters whether you've got it out or not when you start shooting."

Lando sucks a slow breath in and turn his head away. Billy waits, watching a muscle twitch at the edge of his jaw, the only part of his face his can see. The sun's climbing higher, and the quiet hangs still between them. Lando lets the pent-up air out of his lungs, his shoulders dropping into a slump.

"Sometimes you're an ass, Bill," he says to the far side of the clearing. The hand holding the gun sinks to his side.

The response rocks him back a half-step, though he doesn't mean to move. Lando half-turns at the sound of pebbles shifting; his gaze aims itself at some patch of ground a few yards in front of him, as though he doesn't quite want to look at him directly yet. Billy, for his own part, stands there and waits for the strange pressure in his chest to dissipate. It's an unfamiliar feeling. Anger (at himself for not being better at this), regret (because he knows bone-deep that easing off will only sink them later on), and other things too dense and unfamiliar for him to put names to them.

The silence drags itself out long enough that Lando looks up at Billy, his face wary and shuttered. "I'm not going to run you around for fun, Lando," Billy says, and the words come out quiet. Lando studies Billy's face, considering this (and it's uncomfortable, being looked at right now, but he can't pin down why so he just waits under it); a little of the tension unwinds itself visibly from Lando's shoulders, and he scrubs his free hand across his face.

"Okay," he says, and then, less clearly: "Sorry."

It's not, obviously, but this moment is getting thicker than Billy'd really like, so he sidesteps the apology and turns back to the task at hand. "That's all right. But you need to know these things, or at least start thinking on them, and I need to know what to teach you." Lando nods and shakes his shoulders, the way a horse dislodges a fly. He's back to studying the far edges of the clearing again. "We know almost enough to start. If you can manage a little bit more, we can move on to the easy part." As irony goes, it's pretty weak, and Billy's left waiting to see if he's managed to coax Lando back in.

Lando suspects he should find the gentle, steady calm in Billy's voice soothing, even comforting, but he's still feeling too jittery to be able to appreciate it. He can feel a muscle in his jaw jumping, but he can't quite unclench his teeth enough to make it stop.

But since he believes Billy when he says he isn't going to run Lando around for fun (or he _wants_ to, anyway), he keeps his gaze fixed on the shooting gallery he's set up (what now feels like hours ago, when he was still thinking of this whole thing as fun), because he doesn't want Billy to know how angry he still is. Justified or not.

 _Just get through it,_ he thinks, and it should be easy because God knows he's done it often enough, just stood still and let his step-father lecture him about being a man or rant on Lando's shortcomings (or even worse, on Lando's _father's_ failures, with Lando, with the ranch, with whatever he happened to be riled about that day). Let whatever it was just unravel until he finally ran out of words or temper.

But this is different. He's never had to endure something like it from Billy, not like this. Bills hardly says anything about what Lando does wrong; he's naturally fairly spare with words, anyway, which is what makes winning praise from him so ... worthy. When Lando screws up, it's usually just, "Try it again," or "You can do better," or occasionally an explanation as to why what Lando did won't work. But. He won't quit. He won't. So.

"Yeah, okay," he says, and feels more than sees Billy nod. He can't help bracing himself a little for whatever is still left that Billy wants to know. _Just get through it,_ he thinks again -- because he guesses it must be something Billy thinks is important if he's willing to put up with Lando's sullenness without comment -- but he still isn't ready for it when Billy says:

"Could you shoot a man who didn't know he had it coming?"

He flinches, he can't stop it, and half-gasps, "No!" It feels a little like the words and his breath are being shoved out of him by a painless blow to the gut, but while it doesn't actually hurt, there's some kind of rolling, thunderous panic blossoming there, and he's horrified to feel a tell-tale burning at the backs of his eyes. "Christ, Billy, no!"

"Hey, hey now," Billy says, his voice now faintly concerned. He steps forward (and Lando draws himself in, feels it happening without being able to stop himself, and sees Billy seeing it, though he can't tell from Billy's face what he thinks of it, as per usual), and sets a hand on Lando's back, directly between his shoulder blades. Lando blinks -- he isn't sure what he'd been expecting, but that wasn't it -- but doesn't move away. For a long moment Billy just looks at Lando. There's a little verticle line between his brows and his eyes are slightly narrowed, which is how Billy looks when someone seriously pisses him off, but it's different. It takes Lando a few more seconds to translate that expression into worry, and when he does he feels a little flare of something behind his breastbone. He might've said something stupid, then (he can almost feel the urge to apologize crouching in his throat, right under his Adam's apple), but Billy tilts his head a little and takes Lando by both shoulders, turning him (and Lando's too surprised to resist even a little) a bit so they're facing each other.

"I," Lando stammers, "I can't, I..."

Billy gives him a single, gentle little shake, and Lando blinks again. "I don't reckon you're ever going to have to," he says quietly, and it sounds an awful lot like an promise to Lando. The flare of warmth behind his breastbone blazes for a moment, and Lando's breath catches, hitches unsteadily. "You just need to know so you don't find out the wrong answer at the wrong time." He pauses and gives Lando another little shake. "Okay?" he murmurs, and Lando nods a little dazedly.

It's Billy's touch that calms him, really. Billy hardly ever touches him, so it's not expected, and it's soothing, even with the way Lando's head suddenly feels like he's been clipped a good one in the ear. Billy just continues to look at him, so Lando says, "I'm fine. I just ..." He shrugs, trying to shake off whatever it is that's making him feel so ... off-balance, all of a sudden. "I _said_ when i _have_ to, Billy. And that's what i meant. _Have_ to." He waves one hand, gesturing a little aimlessly sort of in Billy's direction. "I'm not ... I won't ..." He trails off, uncertain how to say what he wants to say.

Lando doesn't finish and Billy's doesn't need him to, because it's clear enough where that sentence is headed. Concern (a strange feeling, not one he's used to) drains away and leave its space for something colder, a cloud in front of the sun. _I'm not:_ like you; _I won't:_ do the things you do. It's true, all right, even more than in the telling of it, because Lando has seen Billy kill, but he doesn't know all the killing he is capable of. There are other deaths, delivered by steel, by lead and fire, that a better man would wear as a scar on his soul and a worse one as a notch in his belt. Billy carries them as scuffs on the metal of his guns -- they're there, all right, but they hold no weight and the memory of them doesn't slow his hand.

Billy is not a good man. Lando will be. Nothing that true needs to be said out loud.

He lets the brim of his hat shade his face for a moment and slides his hands an inch or so down Lando's arms, squeezes once before letting go. "Let's do what we set out to do," he says. "I'll talk you through it."

Lando curls into himself a hair more -- Billy can't tell if it's at the thought of firing a gun or if his shoulders have just been waiting to hunch and can now that Billy's hands are gone -- and he glances down at the revolver in his hand. His grip's changed again; he's holding it properly, hand curled around the stock, index finger resting along the trigger guard, but with a cautious edge he hadn't had at the start of the lesson. Since the day they bought it he's held it with care, but the same care he'll show for a toolkit or a deck of cards. Now he's holding it like a weapon. Billy watches a little more of Lando's youth rise off of him, steam in the morning sun, and doesn't know whether he should be sorry to see it go.

"Okay, yeah," he says, straightening his shoulders and lifting his eyes from the gun. "What first?"

"First," Billy tells him, "I want you to holster your gun." Lando's head turns a little at that, chin coming up, and Billy lays out the shape of his thoughts before Lando can get the wrong idea. "When you're shooting out of necessity, it's a safe bet you won't be drawing till you mean to fire. That means you're gonna have to do it all in one motion, and you're going to be aiming and firing from the hip. It's not as easy as having your gun right out in front of you, but the skill you're going to use is the one you want to practice."

Lando's face clears as he listens to the explanation, visibly linking the physical task to the net of questions before. Billy's damn relieved to see the suspiciousness dissipate; he's not good enough at this to get to the heart of the matter by talk alone, so it's fortunate that his ass-backwards teaching style has finally looped them to the point he was trying to reach. "We'll take it slow for now; speed'll come with time," he continues, and Lando nods and slides the gun into the holster. "Drop your hand to the gripstock -- is the holster at a good height? Good. You always want to holster on the same side, _not_ border-style. Know why?"

Hand resting on the butt of the gun, Lando considers this. "Faster?"

Billy nods approval. "Dead right -- takes less movement, too. If your hand's gotta cross your hip, the man you're gunning for is gonna see you moving years before you get there, and swinging back across makes you more inclined to shoot wide." He walks around to Lando's far side and faces the shooting range, making sure that Lando's got a clear view of his right hand. "Now watch. When you go for your gun: get your fingers in place as you pull free. Thumb cocks the hammer back and swings the gun up -- get the barrel level as your hand comes forward -- and you pull the trigger." As he talks, hand and gun match words in a slowed-down version of the technique he's describing. It's a sight harder to keep the draw clean this slow, but this is how Billy taught himself to shoot, running through the motions at half-speed over and over while he isolated all the extra twists and swings that marred his aim and smoothed them out. He hasn't had to practice like that for years, but his body remembers, and the gun slides as surely through the air as though he'd carved a channel for it. He doesn't fire -- no need to waste a bullet -- just finishes with the gun hovering inches from his hip and holds there for a moment before flipping it back into the holster.

Billy circles back around to Lando's gun-side, stopping a half-pace behind him, and gestures at the target range. "Go ahead."

Lando twitches, straightening abruptly, the invitation to begin somehow taking him by surprise. He turns dead-on to the range and lets his eyes scan all possible targets, though he knows already what he's going to go for. The grinning, empty-eyed skull is just too tempting a target.

He doesn't give into the urge to think about the actual mechanics of it; it never helps him to do that. In fact, it would be fair to say that he's only safe really _thinking_ about how a thing is done once he's already comfortable with doing it. Instead, he replays Billy's draw in his head, just the motion of it, and feels the muscles of his shoulders and neck ease as he fixes his gaze on the skull and imagines it shattering.

A faint tickle of excitement itches faintly at his skin, and his right hand twitches and settles onto the butt of the pistol easily. And it _is_ easy. It feels just right, and he acknowledges silently that while the idea of shooting _somebody_ makes him deeply uneasy, the idea of shooting itself ... Well. He likes that just fine.

"Just the draw?" he hears himself ask, as though from a distance. "Or do you want me to actually shoot?"

"The whole thing, and keep the gun out when you've fired," Billy says, his voice falling into what Lando thinks of as his "teaching cadence," a slow rise and fall of voice that indicates nothing at all, no expectation and no impatience, but rather just conveys information. "Don't think about it too hard, and don't worry if you miss your mark -- we got plenty of bullets. Just pick your target and let's find out what your body knows."

The itching of his skin shifts and solidifies into a bright, hard knot in his belly -- he faintly recognizes this as having something to do with Billy's choice of words, but the understanding of that seems unimportant -- and he flexes his fingers on the smooth, warm butt of his -- _his_ \-- gun.

He doesn't even try for speed. Instead, he goes for a smooth, easy motion, something that feels as natural as this always looks when Billy is doing it, and he's as surprised as he can be when the gun comes out and up not just smoothly, but almost fluidly, like his hand already knew this, and had just been waiting patiently for his head to catch up. His finger finds the trigger by some natural grace, and it all feels eerily familiar, as though he's done this, as though he remembers it in some fashion, and when he squeezes it's an extention of that motion, slow and easy and utterly correct.

He isn't surprised when the badger skull explodes, and the flat, heavy crack of the shot doesn't startle him in the least. The kick of the gun is expected, and he rolls his shoulder to absorb it without thought.

He stands there for a long moment, after, considering. It wasn't fast the way that Billy is fast -- no one else is that fast -- but it was still bloody fast. He _knows_ it.

Easy as poker.

Easier.

He slides the pistol back into the holster slowly, but doesn't take his hand off of it. He's conscious of his grip on the butt of the gun, of the way the grain feels under the pads of his fingers, and though he isn't consciously looking at any of the other targets he'd set up, he knows where they are, he knows how to move if he were going to try for them.

He turns to look at Billy -- also familiar, utterly so -- and sees the gleam in his eyes, the very faint crinkle at the corners of his eyes that isn't a smile, but _is_ , for him.

"Bills," he says, and Billy's chin comes up, his eyes narrowing slightly, as though he's heard something unexpected in Lando's voice. Lando doesn't doubt it. He hears it, too. The satisfaction, the cool, bright certainty. He hears it. "I can do this," Lando says.

Billy gives a single nod, but Lando shakes his head.

"No," he says almost sharply. "I mean. Look."

He turns back, and this time he doesn't look at any one target, almost doesn't look at anything at all, just lets his eyes rove over the range, lets his smart right hand pluck the gun from the holster, and he's firing almost at once, watching the old boot flip end over end, a triangular slice of shale disintegrate, the bird's nest explode into a shower of straw and twigs, and he stops only when the click of the hammer is dry and flat, breathing hard and feeling almost feverish.

He eases the hammer back down -- apparently his hand had tried to cock it again, fire it again, before he'd registered the lack of bullet on the last shot -- and slowly, carefully, drops the hot metal back into his holster.

In the back of his mind, Billy's aware that he's holding his breath and has been since Lando's gun cleared leather for the second time. It's not out of surprise (the day he does something that damn-fool obvious is the day he turns in his deck) but a sort of reverence, instinct urging him not to interrupt what he could see coming just an instant before it started. Hands resting on his own pistols (and it's just his own body heat and the sun, but he feels a sympathetic sort of warmth in the grips), he lets himself stare out over the range for a minute. There's nothing new he needs to glean from it; as he looks over the debris, he's running the same five seconds over and over again in his head. The way Lando had moved, gun swinging easy from target to target like each bullet knew what it was meant for and just borrowed his arm to get there. The long narrow curve of his posture, the lazy sweep of his hand. There's a certain casualness some gunfighters get, where every motion is as loose and as sure as the pendulum swinging in a grandfather clock. A sort of deceptive slackness that, in Billy's experience, comes with vast familiarity, a taste for murder, or being more than a little touched in the head. Lando's got none of those qualities (jokes about the last aside), but he's got that look about him even with his hand resting on a gun still hot from the first shots he's ever fired.

Lando's no killer and they both know it, but if Billy came upon him as a stranger, he'd keep both hands free.

The queerest part, though, is how steady he looks. From the first day Billy picked him up on the road, Lando has had a mercurial quality about him, like he's always a moment away from being somewhere else. That's gone now, like emptying the chamber knocked him into place. Billy looks him over, trying to take in the difference, and Lando stands easy through it. His eyes are bright, his face a little flushed -- and what's not there, Billy realizes, is Lando's perpetual question: _did I do all right?_ He may be waiting patiently for Billy's judgment, but it's plain as day that this time he's judged his own performance and known its worth.

He looks like a man.

It's a strange realization, and Billy tips his head a little under it, runs his thumb along the brim of his hat and smiles. Lando cocks his head a little at Billy's chuckle, and Billy hooks his thumbs into his gunbelts and leans back to grin up at the sun. "I don't even know why I'm surprised," he says to the placid blue sky, and he looks back in time to catch Lando's own smile spreading wide.

They share theirs between them for a minute.

"All right," Billy says, and he reaches over to claps Lando on the shoulder without really thinking about it. "Reload and show me that again, a little faster, and then we'll see how you shoot when you're moving."  



End file.
